Authors: Jason Hightman
“W
E’RE GOING INTO THE
palace. But we’re not going in there to die,” Simon told Key, his voice echoing in the machine shop. “You’re going to need this.”
He opened his backpack, revealing the black armor pieces he’d found in Key’s room, along with a long silver dagger from the ship. The Black Dragon seemed to recoil ever so slightly from the sight of the weapons, tucking his fur-lined tail behind his back.
Key stared at the forbidden armor, looking both pleased and worried. “You carried that for me, all this time?”
“Didn’t have room for the helmet,” said Simon. “I wanted to give it to you before, with the tigers, but I didn’t have time.”
Armored under their coats, the three left Mamoru still restfully unconscious and headed for Issindra’s domain. There they planned to bait her and catch her with her own trap…if they could figure out what that was. Simon tried to turn the worry in his stomach into excitement.
Once inside the Tiger Palace, Simon and Key were led by the Black Dragon past the floors of miserable workers, rows of them at sewing machines, who looked up at them with dull, spellbound eyes. Huge tiger’s-eye sculptures clicked and rumbled above them. The boys kept moving, their St. George blood immune to the palace’s power, but their fear was growing the deeper they went into the Serpent’s domain.
And for good reason. Roaming guards approached, alert and suspicious, threatening to stop them. The Dragon, however, was a powerful ally, bewitching the guards to let them pass unhindered. Key let out a worried breath as they moved onward without a word.
It was at the sixth floor, after passing so many of the laborers, that Simon decided he couldn’t stand to see any more suffering.
“We have to free these people,” he said, his attention caught on a skinny young girl who was pulling a cart loaded with heavy rolls of fabric.
“How?” said Key.
“It will delay us,” the Black Dragon cautioned.
“Are you drawing strength from this, too?” Simon accused him. “We have to take away the Dragon’s strength. It’s good to get her off-guard, but we need to throw her off-balance. We have to rob her of the thing that makes this place home to her.”
“Can you break her magic?” Key asked the Dragon.
The Black Dragon moved into the workroom. He eyed the supervisor, a fat, slow-witted woman who approached with a pompous air. The Dragon raised his finger, and pointed at the door, and to Simon’s surprise, the woman strode directly past them and out, her expression glazed by his sorcery.
Then the Dragon hobbled down past the rows of textile machines and workers, to the great tiger’s-eye sculpture clicking at the back of the room. The eye burned down on all the workers, made them accept any pay, any job, any humiliation.
With a shaking hand, the Dragon swung his cane at the sculpture, but his strength alone was not enough. Seeing this, the boys ran up, hammering at the eye with their weapons, their blows ringing, clanging, until the cracks grew. The sculpture fell from the wall, rolling off to shatter into pieces; the sound a sweet symphony of destruction. In breaking the sculpture, they’d broken the spell.
The factory ground to a halt.
“Tell them the work ends early today,” the Black Dragon told a foreman. In a daze, the foreman followed the Black Dragon’s instructions. “Tell them to come back to the palace tomorrow,” he said. “There will be gold for them to take. And silver. Overdue payments.”
“Just what’s going on here?” said a rumbling voice, and in came the security chief, a burly, blue-turbaned man with a killer’s stare. His hate was no work of Dragon magic. He’d taken the job because he liked to hurt people, pure and simple. He moved to block the exit.
The Black Dragon raised his finger.
“Don’t point at me, you old Chinese imbecile,” the man barked. “I asked you a question. Do you speak English? What are you doing here?”
Key whispered to Simon, “He’s too big. Make him fall, use his own weight to pull him down.” Taking the cue, Simon strode up to the security chief and kicked him in the leg, snarling, “Why don’t you just shut up and get out of our way!”
When the chief lunged at him, Simon tripped him, and the man tumbled past him into the wall and banged his head, knocking himself unconscious. Key nodded with satisfaction, as if finished with an algebra problem.
The Black Dragon lifted the security chief’s walkie-talkie, and, mimicking his voice, he told the remaining guards to flee the building, go home, evacuate the workers, there was a toxic gas leak, nothing could contain it. The workers in the room stared in confusion at the old Chinese man.
He bowed and motioned to the door.
The palace was liberated. Workers flooded out of the building, like zombies restored to life but not yet believing it. They trailed out in the strengthening storm, the sky seemingly ready to collapse on them, the earth bucking as if to free itself from bonds of its own.
Inside, the sight of the chains in the factory made Simon sick.
He lifted the binds, small enough for children to wear. “Why do you do this? Why is your kind like this?” he said to the Black Dragon.
“That…is a simple question,” said the old Serpent. “We feed on the pain. The riddle of it is why we are here at all. Why should nature seek to bring something like me…to life? But, then, is there not a reason for all things?”
“Do you have an answer?” pressed Simon. “’Cause I don’t.”
“No one will ever solve it,” the Black Dragon said, holding his gaze. “But if there were no evil in
humankind for the Dragon to feed upon, the Dragon would die out. Why is
your
kind like this?”
“People are evil. I told you, I don’t like thinking about it.” Simon sighed, and moved to the door.
“Ah,” said the Black Dragon. “To think of such things makes us old. But wiser. To question makes you stronger.”
“Then
you
think about it,” said Simon, heading out. “It makes me feel weaker. I don’t want to think about how sick the world is.”
“Then truly evil has no purpose.”
Mamoru had awoken in the parts factory with an almost instantaneous understanding of what had happened. He had been awake enough to have heard the voices of the boys and understand they were plotting something.
In disbelief that Key could do this to him, and cursing Simon St. George, Mamoru knew the Black Dragon could not possibly have dealt him the knockout blow. He’d watched its every move.
Simon had done it, he was certain.
Not sure where he’d find the boys, Mamoru immediately began walking to the harbor, where he suspected they were trying to get into the battle. He reached in his pocket for cab fare and found another object, the netsuke of the good Dragon, the ivory
meant to reassure him, but it only made him angrier.
Mamoru alone had been left to protect the children. It was his only task. He knew Sachiko would be furious.
Facing the worsening storm, and cursing himself for being stupid, he hurried through the throngs of people toward a taxicab.
Simon, Key, and the Black Dragon had reached the top floor of the palace.
Before them were the giant wooden doors of the Tiger Dragon’s bedchamber.
Simon hesitated. “You aren’t afraid of what’s in here, are you?”
The Black Dragon stared up at the towering doors. “I would be of little help if I stayed out here beyond the fray. I will trust that the legends exaggerated her powers and her trickeries.”
Simon flung open the doors, and a huge open room with enormous windows, a pavilion atop the palace, greeted them. Jungle trees were rooted beneath the stone floor, and vines wrapped around snake-figure columns, while torches made for dim light. Exotic birds called from somewhere in the sinister greenery. The Black Dragon’s canary hid itself in its master’s fur. Simon could understand its fear. The entire room seemed to shiver and shudder as the dark
leaves swayed in the hot storm winds, hiding untold threats.
Simon moved into the room.
Chanting, the Black Dragon forced the torchlight to grow stronger, and the boys found a panel in the floor, through which they could stare down at Issindra’s prized animals.
The cages were very narrow. Tigers circled the tight quarters, restless, unaware of Simon and Key above. A thick glass shield engraved with Dragonrunes topped the cages. The runes slid around, words gliding over words, enchanted.
“Rune-writing,” said Key, pointing to the glass top on the first cage. “It’s meant to keep fires contained. This trap wasn’t made for tigers—it was made for a Dragon.”
“So this is how the Tiger Dragon will trap the Japanese Dragon,” said Simon, taking it in.
“This is what I’m thinking.”
“This is how she will
hold
him,” said the Black Dragon. “But to
trap
him there must be something else…a spellchant, hypnosis. The room itself may be rife with ancient power. Perhaps she activates the sculpted snakes there along the walls, as the legends say.”
The old creature looked down on the feline zoo. “The tiger is a solitary animal, it meets with others only to mate,” said the Black Dragon slowly. “She has
followed her enemy so long she loves him. Not unheard of, in Serpents or in humans. That’s what the writing here really is. It is a sleepspell for a Dragon, to bring him here and keep him.”
Not just the floor below them, but the bedchamber as well, was riddled with trapdoors and cages. The entire palace was filled with snares.
“
We
can use these traps, too,” said Key. “One at a time. This is what I was hoping for. We let the Tiger Dragon trap the Japanese, and then we lock her in as well. They’ll both try to burn their way out, and when they’re out of energy—you send down your blackfire and finish them. Your fire
will
kill them, right?”
The Black Dragon thought for a minute, his dark fur rippling from the night winds, and then he nodded, grim. “There’s good chances the Tiger Dragon never anticipated these traps would be used against her very own magic. It could work. It will be safer than any of you trying to use a deathspell.”
“But we know the spell if we need it,” said Key, “we studied all the Indian deathspells before we arrived here.” The Black Dragon’s eyes wrinkled in worry that it should come to hand-to-hand combat. “We memorized the Ice Serpent’s as well, just in case, and the Dragon of Japan we’ve been ready to fight for a long time,” Key added.
“We still need to get the Tiger Serpent
in
the
cage,” noted the Dragon.
“You say she loves him?” scoffed Simon, looking at the traps. “You are very strange animals.”
“As are you,” said the Black Dragon. “Indeed, the Dragonkind loves human strangeness.”
“Well, I try not to think about human strangeness very much.”
The Black Dragon looked at him quizzically. “What has happened to you, Simon? You were always the questioner. Now you do not question things?”
Simon studied the traps. “I just want to know where to go and what the mission is. Let’s get going. What do we need to do?”
“But do you ever wonder what the mission is for?”
“It just tires you out, questioning everything all the time. Takes too much.”
The old Dragon looked disturbed. “The good soldier.”
“That’s right. What’s wrong with that?”
“A soldier sees only targets. You are becoming like your father.”
Simon shrugged him off, as he and Key looked down on the caged tigers anxiously. Where to begin….
“Well, staring at it all night is not going to get the job done and finished,” said the Black Dragon, leaning
against the wall, smoking his long pipe. “We need all the trappings we can get. The tigers must come out, so the Dragons can come in.”
“Do we
know
this will hold her?” wondered Simon aloud, and he peered closer at the glass. The tiger below sensed him, and looked up, leaping to scratch the glass. Key yelped and fell back.
“No guarantees,” said the Black Dragon.
“I’ll settle for some good odds,” said Simon.
“Good odds, I think not,” mused the Black Dragon, circling his pipe in the air. “But decent odds.”
“What did I just say? I don’t like ‘decent,’” said Simon. “I want good. I want great.”
“You want lies,” smiled the Dragon.
“If that’s the best you can do.”
The Dragon blew away smoke and looked directly at him. “It’s perfect.”
The Dragonhunters had gotten as close as they could to the harbor, but rising tides had swamped the street. They leapt one by one from their car to a high, narrow wall beside a building. From here, Sachiko got a sobering look at the size of the growing storm, and the lightning menacing the Tiger Dragon’s palace.
“They’re out of there now. The boys are safe,” Aldric said, worried himself.
“I know,” she replied with a concerned smile, and,
in a consoling gesture that surprised Aldric, she reached out and gripped his arm. “They’re all right.”
Behind them, getting to the narrow wall last in line, Taro watched her. “She gives
him
comfort,” his low voice rumbled, “very kind of her.”
Sachiko was visibly unsettled. Alaythia seemed to want to say something in her defense, but at a loss, she began moving along the pathway.
Akira looked back at Taro. “You see torment in the smallest of things,” he said. “Your house is strong…and what all of us envy.”
Taro looked stunned.
“You should have stayed with the boy,” Akira warned. “None of us have as much to lose.”
I
N THE
T
IGER
D
RAGON’S PALACE
chamber, a dangerous plan was being prepared.
“I’m trusting you that this will work,” Simon was saying. “I never heard of it before. You can talk to each other in your heads—actually
in
your heads?”
“Not talk,” said the Dragon. “Crysounds. Pleading noises. Like whalesong.”
“They’ll think you’re held captive here. They’ll know where it comes from?”
“Yes.”
“They’ll think the Hunters are harming you.”
“They should. Yes. A thousand times, yes,” the old Dragon said, irritably.
Key piped in. “Then we just stay calm. We bait
them to leave the harbor, and all we have to do is wait for them here.”
“And then we have to
destroy
them,” said Simon. For a moment, he was disturbed at the enormity of the task, but he thought of the fire roiling beneath Japan, of the chaos here in Bombay, and he regained his resolve. “Let’s hope the trap works. Let’s hope the Tiger Dragon’s already thought of everything
for
us.”
Key looked at him, unsure.
At the same time, his black-and-white frame shivering, the Ice Serpent was finally getting comfortable in a luxurious Land Rover, a taxicab he had gotten tailor-made to his needs while in Bombay, the entire rear section darkened by Indian curtains and padded absurdly with high cushions for his old bones.
And then the noises started inside his brain.
The Ice Serpent heard the distress call of the Chinese Black Dragon deep in his wintery brain, a moaning in the oldest of Dragontongues. This was most unusual. In fact, to his knowledge, it had never happened before. Not in hundreds of years. Dragons hate each other. Even under the threat of death, they do not ask each other for help, not like this, not out of weakness.
This was a whole new chapter for him, an extraordinary development.
The low, echoing cry was unmistakable to Serpentine ears; he knew the Japanese Dragon would hear it, and the Tiger Serpent as well.
Indeed, Issindra had heard the call, as she waited in the harbor.
The Hunters have found the Chinese Black Dragon in the Palace. Hiding in my shadow, seeking protection without my even knowing. What cleverness. So the Hunters have found him there, instead of me. They have invaded. They must be holding him in the palace at this precise moment.
Could she return there? Right into the hands of the Hunters? Her mind spun with possibilities. Leaning against the columns of an old temple, watching the harbor shudder from turmoil, she let the steaming rain run down her Serpentine skin.
Let them all die there,
she thought. This was the opportunity she’d sought. A perfect bait.
Striding a narrow alley, knee-deep in filthy brown water, the Serpent of Japan heard the pleading, moaning song of the Black Dragon and did not know what to make of it. In the palace. In her palace?
What could it mean?
Simon and Key opened the doors on all the tiger traps. The levers were swung. The doors rolled open. And
the tigers broke free, collected into a single large area used, no doubt, for the Tiger Dragon to watch her servants being eaten alive.
The tigers snarled and scratched at each other, none too pleased at having to share their space with others.
“This is why she keeps them separate,” said Simon.
“Let’s hope they stay put,” said Key.
They moved to the window, where the Black Dragon stood watching the storm, waiting for the Tiger Serpent’s return.
“Let’s hope she gets here first,” said Simon. “We have to let her take down the Japanese one herself, then we attack and throw her into one of these traps. She won’t suspect us till it’s too late.”
“There is still the Ice Serpent, somewhere,” said the Black Dragon. “Old crooked thing, in love with death, looking for his place in history. He will be mine to deal with. I owe him.” He rubbed an old wound at his shoulder, growling deeply, and Simon remembered that, despite everything, the creature came from a dark, vengeful species.
“Everything will tumble into place.”
“Oh, it won’t happen like that,” said the Black Dragon.
Simon frowned. “Suddenly you can see the future?”
“The part of it I can see does not go like your plan,” said the Black Dragon.
“Lie to me.”
“It’s going to go perfect.”
In a hammering downpour, the Japanese Serpent faced the Tiger Dragon, each of them sliding their tails back and forth across the watery harbor street. He had at last arrived at his ship, and there she was, waiting. The Serpentine female stood a full two feet taller, but she crouched respectfully, twisting her neck to peer up at him.
He listened to her low, scintillating voice, filled with promise and not a whiff of betrayal. “Set your fear of treachery aside and listen,” she told him. “Listen to the promise of real power without either of us having to die. Listen to the truce I offer, and we shall make it reality. The Hunters have changed nothing. We can still form an alliance and pull from the wreckage a shining prize. How would you like to join me in being the only two Serpents on earth who could deliver the great traitor himself, the Black Dragon of Peking, dead in ashes to the rest of our race?”
And listen the Japanese Dragon did.
“He is mine,” she lied. “Captive. Imprisoned.”
Her adversary sized her up. “What is my part in this?”
“Your ship will leave port untouched,” she promised. “The first of hundreds that will represent our empire. It begins here. Come with me to the palace and join me in killing the Black Dragon. You can see my sincerity; you can read it in my eyes. I have a vision for us—a future that will enrich us both. This unity, it doesn’t have to be a dream.”
The Japanese Dragon ground his teeth, regarding the Tiger Serpent with distaste, deeply suspicious of her docile behavior. Her snakeskin was topped with fur, and that, he knew, hides a whole slew of parasites. The street quivered under them as people in the distance screamed; the Hunters would soon be on the way. A decision needed to be made—join with her, attack, or retreat.
He felt hot, nauseous, as if a volcanic ocean was going to tear out of him, like nothing ever before. She was agitating the power he held within.
Nearby, his cargo ship was preparing to leave the dock. “Don’t leave with it. Don’t let the Hunters force you away,” said the Tiger Dragon. The Japanese Serpent felt something new in the air, saw an unfamiliar element in her eyes. Was it desire? Was that possible?
“We can begin our partnership properly at the palace,” she purred.
Equilibrium
, he thought, as strange feelings surged
inside him, disgust and attraction in equal parts. He wanted to burn the Tiger Creature, knowing it would bring him the greatest joy. But at the same time, he wanted to keep her, to preserve her, perhaps in formaldehyde. In his head he calculated the difficulty of fixing the fire scars on her skin, wondering,
could plastic surgery work well on Dragonflesh? Fascinating challenge.
He scarcely noticed the arrival of the Hunters.
The Tiger Dragon saw them first, as they scattered to take up firing positions at some buildings several yards away. They would have difficulty aiming in the storm, but she was taking no chances.
“The end, or the beginning—your choice,” she hissed, and darted away across the water-glinting street into the flooded boulevard beyond.
He will follow,
she thought.
I have him.
The Japanese Serpent looked back hatefully at the Hunters as their arrows split the rain water. “Now is not the time,” he spat, and turned to follow the Tiger Serpent.
Such muck as this city has
, he thought,
cannot be worth enduring for her
. But he continued his pursuit, spellcasting in the direction of the Hunters to delay them. He’d leave them a nasty surprise.
Further ahead, the Tiger Dragon could feel his approach behind her.
Dragons and Dragonhunters. Too hard to deal with all at once,
she thought.
But there would be time enough to deal with each, one at a time. Could the
Black Dragon already be dead? Did the Hunters leave him to rot in my own palace?
In the lead, ahead of the other Hunters, Aldric was watching the Japanese Serpent sprint away as the huge cargo ship rolled up on the rising tide, pushed forward by Dragonmagic. The ship now blocked Aldric, cutting off his view of the Creatures.
“Watch out!” cried Taro. The massive ship lodged against a building with a metallic groan and a tumbling and splashing of fallen bricks. Crates fell from the side of its deck, cracking open, tumbling dead bodies out everywhere.
Aldric waded away, trying to reach another alley and a way to pursue the Serpents. But the water rose up in the street before him, walling it off in a giant liquid sheet, impassable.
He started to move forward, to press himself through the liquid wall, but the water on the street began whipping around his legs with a whirlpool motion, as if there were hands gripping him, pulling him down by Dragonmagic.
He struggled, falling, trying to keep his head out of water, as Alaythia helped him up. Behind her, in the flashes of lightning, Aldric could see the wading Samurai also fending off the aquatic power of the Dragon, slashing at the water uselessly as it tried to pull them under.
“This magic can’t last—the Thing is gone from here!” Aldric shouted over the rain.
But Alaythia had her eyes closed. So did Sachiko, and as they began spellchanting, the flood waters around the Dragonhunters began to recede.
Success. The two women opened their eyes.
“The storm’s moving!” Toyo shouted, pointing.
Aldric turned. The monsoon was racing over the city, clouds split down the middle, yellow and black on one side, orange and black on the other, all flowing toward…
“The palace,” Aldric said. “They’re going to the palace.”
Then he spied the arrival of a sputtering, waterlogged taxi from a side street, and Mamoru emerged from the back in confusion.
“Where are the boys?” cried Sachiko.
But Aldric knew. His boy was following his
own
plan.
The Tiger Palace was empty.
Issindra emerged into her bedchamber, and knew instantly something was wrong. There were no guards waiting for her. No servants lying dead under a tiger’s claws. And no Black Dragon, captive or dead.
The Tiger Dragon closed her eyes, using her sorcery to search from room to room. Something trembled in
the air, a veiled force that now weakened under her new intensity.
She turned as the Japanese Serpent stepped into the room behind her. Was
that
what she had felt?
“A jungle,” he observed, “within your very walls. How…unique.” His gold-silver head recoiled, as he tried to disguise his repulsion.
The beetles and insects inhabiting the plants and vines began to ooze out of the floor, trickling over Simon’s hand as he hid in the darkness at the back of the chamber. Key winced as a fat roach dropped onto his head.
The Tiger Dragon gave a long-fanged grin. “This needn’t be your home,” she told her rival. “I know of your distaste for organisms. You may remain in Japan.” Her wispy wings rattled in the wind, and she again bowed her head in respect. “With the wealth we create together, you may have as many homes as you like, wherever you wish.”
“And the other Serpents will simply allow us to take their territories?”
The Tiger Dragon purred. “They will have no choice but obedience—or death. You know our bloodlines. They will fear us above all. They will
want
to serve us.”
The Japanese Serpent stared back at her with suspicion and doubt. “Yes, we will deliver them their hated enemy—and where
is
the Black Dragon of
Peking, my sweet?” The word was a taunt, and made his mouth feel unclean.
“All in good time,” she answered, sending her tigerlike tail sliding toward him.
First things first
, she thought.
One threat at a time
. “I must have confidence we are in this together.”
He moved his own snakelike tail away from her instinctively.
Germs
, he thought.
Vileness.
“And just how will this union hold, when so many other Serpent alliances have failed?”
“It will hold,” she answered, “because we will cement our agreement…” Her tail forcefully encoiled around his. “…As no one has before.”
Equilibrium.
He could feel heat rising in him.
Her eyes held his gaze. “Our children will keep us together, a Serpentine army of our own.”
The thought disgusted him. Infant Serpents and the slime they created held little appeal. But imagine an
army
. If he could make them obey him…unlimited riches and power would follow. This female tigerskin, she made him feel something new, an emotion he’d never known.
What was it?
He wanted to destroy her, but he wanted somehow to do it over and over, forever. Could he even dream of a partnership?
Ah, but she would make a lovely flame, wouldn’t she?
Such strength, such impertinence.
Torch her
, his whole body was thinking.
You can’t keep her as a slave.
Across from the palace at that very moment, in the steaming rainfall, the Ice Serpent had crawled onto a rooftop to watch what was happening.
Unity?
He wondered.
Is it possible? Can there be such beauty, creating life to create death?
Meanwhile, the Tiger Dragon sensed the doubt in her companion.
“It may be, Najikko,” she said playfully, “that we shall try to kill each other a thousand times in this alliance. Who knows? All that lively fun can wait. But how will we ever know what we’re capable of achieving, if we don’t even try?”
She whipped her tail across the floor and away from him. Best not to pressure him too much. She needed him to stay put a few moments longer. He’d scarcely heard the hissing of her snake sculptures, but they were doing their hypnotic work. He was tiring.