Oh, Zip.
Please be safe, Zip,
she breathed to the wind and the Islands.
Yorbik dwarfed all other Islands. That was where the huge shipyards were located, the engineering bays within which they built the great Sylakian Dragonship fleets which dominated the world. If the shipyards fell, then the days of Sylakia’s power were numbered, unless Thoralian had more Dragons.
Then, the eventual prize–Sylakia itself. Bait the rajal in his den.
Fra’anior? Is Yagga Island where I should search for the Dragon?
The whispering of the wind swallowed her plaintive call.
As Aranya approached Naphtha Cluster, realisation struck as if she had swallowed a six-foot crossbow quarrel. The rock was bare because it had been burned. The black was the soot and scorch marks of Island-wide fires. A tiny amount of greenery was growing back, like the first fuzz of hair after a head had been shaved, but the colour struck her as sickly. On her father’s map this Cluster had been marked as a populous one, one of the most populous in the Western Isles. Now there was nothing.
Only wind keening across barren rock.
Sick to her stomach, Aranya understood the reality of what she had heard but not appreciated with such visceral clarity, until now. Rolodia Island had rebelled against the Sylakians. They had razed the Island, slaughtered the people, poisoned the lakes, and burned the fields and forests. That was what had happened here. The destruction was too complete to be anything but man-made. Island after Island, large and small, tens of Islands across the space of several square leagues, had succumbed to the scourge of the Sylakian Empire. She saw the shells of iron cart-wheels, the bleached white of bone piles and the beams of houses or buildings lodged way down the cliffs. The Sylakians had thrown anything that remained after their destruction, off the cliffs.
The sorrow in her Dragon-hearts sobbed across the land, mingling with the moaning of the desolate wind.
A
rdan thrashed against
his pillow-roll.
Fire! Ash billowing into the sky, fires everywhere he looked, running over burning rock, his heart pounding in his throat as he ran to escape the fires … but his legs slowed. The powerful running stopped. Suddenly, he could not move. His eyes would not even close.
He lay like that for an eternity before he heard the bolts scraping at his door.
“Awake, pretty boy?”
Rocia? Ardan wanted to turn toward her, but his body remained immobile.
“Find the snake,” said Rocia. “Get him on a litter.”
Torchlight flickered across his eyes. By the sounds, he knew there were several women in the room with him. His vision lurched as someone pushed his body with their boot. He saw Rocia, Mardia and a number of other warriors–six in all. What were they doing? Why couldn’t he move? Where was Kylara? Now he remembered–she had departed the previous day for the villages.
“Snake did the job?” said a voice.
Rocia said, “Can’t move a muscle.”
Snake? Was that the reason for his paralysis? The roof moved above him. He felt strangely dislocated, as though he were floating through Kylara’s bedchamber. The warriors carried Ardan through an interminable number of tunnels, and then out in the open for what felt to him to be several hours. At some point in the starlit journey, he felt a quiver return to his eyelids. The paralysis was wearing off.
Now they carried him into a cool, dank tunnel. A narrow entryway led to what he sensed was a large open space. The torchlight receded. He heard wooden mallets pounding, great blows coming dully to his desensitised hearing. The warriors dumped him on the sandy floor. His arms and legs moved. A hint of feeling stole back into his muscles, enough to let him know that he was being lashed to stakes in a spread-eagle position.
“What you gonna tell Kylara?” asked Mardia.
Rocia spat on Ardan’s leg. “This boy’s playing our Warlord for a fool. Anyone can see she’s naïve. We make him talk, nice-like, and then we throw him off a cliff. Tell Kylara he ran away. Ran away, got that?”
“Aye,” said Mardia. “Why not leave him for the caveworms?”
“Gotta make sure the job’s done.” Rocia’s face hove into view above Ardan. “Ya got powers, boy? Ya take a stroke as could fell a windroc, and don’t die? Something’s not right. And I don’t buy this ‘I don’t remember’ pony-manure. Ya talk, ya die. That’s today’s work for ya.”
Ardan’s fingers quivered.
“Got to wait for the poison to wear off,” said another warrior. “He won’t feel it otherwise.”
“Aye. Drink, anyone?” Rocia asked. “Besides, I’m getting tired of playing second rajal to Kylara. Maybe she needs to fly, too.”
So, Rocia plotted against Kylara. He should have guessed she had ambitions. The warriors passed around a gourd of potent prekki spirit. Gradually, Ardan began to notice light filtering down from somewhere above. The cavern was huge, disappearing into shadows in every direction. He saw how the warriors had staked him out. No chances. The ropes securing his wrists and ankles were double-lashed to thick stakes driven deep into the cavern floor. Some feeling had crept back into his limbs, but not enough.
This was looking even worse than the day Kylara had tried to spill his brains out beneath the prekki-fruit tree.
Ardan cleared his throat. He felt as though he had been gargling rocks all night. “I don’t suppose you’d skip this if I entertained you with a song and a dance?” he croaked.
Rocia smiled a windroc’s smile at him. “Too late for that, boy. Sudden urge to talk?”
“Can’t we reach an understanding?”
“Had ya opportunity. Lost it,” she said. Rocia pulled a large, tightly-lidded metal container out of her backpack. The lid had holes punched in it. “Don’t know if ya heard of these, slave? Cannibal slugs. A special surprise of these caves.” Twisting open the container, Rocia peered inside. “They’ll eat just about any flesh. We use them to clean animal skins. Don’t like the hide, ya see. But they’ll pick anything else perfectly clean.”
She leaned over him and with her dagger-point, traced several lines on his stomach. Blood welled up instantly. “We’ll give them a taster over here.”
Carefully, Rocia tipped the jar and dropped several slugs on his stomach. Ardan’s eyes widened. Five inches long and a revolting luminous green in colour, the slugs reminded him of the swamp leeches of his native Naphtha Cluster. Cool slime trailed across his skin.
“They have little teeth on the underside. Kind of like a file or a rasp. Whatever they do or secrete, it burns like nothing you ever felt before. So, what’s ya real name?”
“Ardan, best I remember.”
He gazed down his body. The slugs moved slowly but inexorably, aiming for the thin trails of blood on his skin. His skin burned like an acid bath. He tested the lashings with strength born of a growing, burning discomfort. He bit his lip, hard. Rocia tipped several more slugs onto his stomach and chest.
“Tell us about ya powers, Ardan.”
“Put them in his armpits, Rocia,” said Marcia. “He’ll sing like a parakeet.”
Sweat broke out on Ardan’s forehead. He groaned, “I don’t have powers. You have to believe me.”
“Better start talking.”
Now he felt the tiny rasps working on his flesh, abrading his skin, scraping the raw nerve endings to produce an exquisite kind of pain he had never experienced before. He would rather have had a dagger plunged into his gut, or walked across red-hot coals. The pain was excruciating. It excised his courage and unmanned him. Moaning, Ardan threw all of his strength against the ropes. He tasted blood in his mouth as his back arched up off the ground, clenched in an impossible, never-ending muscle spasm. And still the pain piled on, layer upon layer, suffocating in its intensity, driving through his body and mind like a storm ripping across an Island, taking everything with it. His world was anguish. He could think of nothing else.
“I’ve seen a man twist up so good he broke his own back,” Rocia said to Mardia. “Oh look, one fell off. Put it back.”
“Gaaarargh!”
screamed Ardan.
“Ya powers, Ardan. How’d ya stop Kylara’s blade? Tell me, and I’ll take the slugs off ya.”
Someone was sobbing, sobbing for relief as the slugs peeled away his skin. Rocia kept nagging with her questions. The torment continued without a second’s respite. They added slugs to his inner thighs and the crook of his left elbow. The women passed around the flask of spirits, clearly settling in to enjoy the spectacle of his suffering. Shrill laughter surrounded him. The warriors unearthed another container and added slug after slug, until his body was covered in caustic slime and the slugs crawled over each other to try to find untouched skin to flay.
The slugs ate very slowly. Each rasped the skin separately, a point of pain somewhere in a universe of agony, while he screamed worse than a woman in the throes of childbirth. Ardan would have done anything, said anything, promised anything, to make it stop.
But the burning continued, tongues of agony lapping at his insides, until through the wall of white pain Ardan began to see impossibilities, to hallucinate, to know that he was lying atop a bonfire and the fires were burning in him and through him, cleansing and reaming, stripping away his humanity until nothing remained but the animal within, the animal squealing in mortal pain beneath the beaks of the predators, the six windrocs around him tearing at his entrails while he lay helpless to stop them, the claws tearing apart his rib-cage to expose his throbbing pink heart to the open air, until he no longer knew his name or his past and he was back beneath the prekki-fruit tree, and still further back, finding his way across the Cloudlands and he was …
Drowning. Shooting comet-like across the Island-World. A volcano of power surged up from his gut, unstoppable.
No-longer-Ardan stood beneath the mountain, feeling the weight of ancient rock pressing down upon his presence, and he became the beast. A roaring shook the cavern as though an earthquake had struck in that small space.
Little creatures screamed and flapped about him. He swatted two of them. Pesky insects. Hunger raged inside his belly, consuming all even as the pain had consumed him in the time before. Meat! He needed meat. He was faint with hunger, starving, weak and trembling with his need. The beast flung itself around the cavern, meeting rock everywhere. No tunnel was large enough to allow him passage. He bellowed and clawed at the rock. Food! Quell the pangs!
There. The sensitive nostrils presented a delicious scent to his brain. He pounced, bit deep, and fed. All was blood. Blood was good.
The insects were gone. Three lay crumpled before him, never to move again. The creature ate of the long meat-worm until it stopped twitching and his belly groaned with fullness.
Then, he slept.
* * * *
In the clouded skies above Naphtha Cluster, the Amethyst Dragon panted to Yolathion, “They’re on high alert.”
“No jokes, eh?”
“Ten Dragonships hiding behind the northern cliff. We need to tell my Dad.”
“And only twenty-two above the fortress.” Because of his ear protection, the giant Jeradian was almost shouting at her. “Even numbers, but you know what that means in a Dragonship battle.”
“Aye.” The Dragoness’ lip curled. “We need to break the line and convince them we’re not here to play Staves with them.”
After briefing King Beran, Aranya and Yolathion headed toward the blocky black fortress. The Sylakian forces were distributed above and around it, protecting each other with overlapping fields of fire for their war crossbows and catapults. Each of the four corner towers boasted a towering war catapult, a structure some thirty feet tall. They would most likely be loaded with metal or rock shrapnel, which worked as effectively for downing Dragonships as it did against Dragons.
Directly above the fortress, one of the hulking four-hundred-foot armoured Dragonships motored against the blustering breeze. Four footings on the gantries above the hydrogen sack housed catapults which could shoot nets designed to snarl a Dragon’s wings–as she well knew.
The brisk wind made it a difficult day for a Dragonship battle. Aranya examined an unfamiliar tension in her belly, as though one of her stomachs had stretched to contain an overload of Dragon fire. She glanced beyond the dark battlements. The south-western horizon struck her as ominous, a deep copper colour with distinctly green overtones, as though the sky were a once-bright metal, corroded and discoloured. Fractious growls of thunder carried to her Dragon hearing. Displeased Land Dragons arguing, she thought, with a sharp, painful clenching of her flight muscles. Now, where had that odd thought popped up from?
Aranya felt curiously unsettled as she returned her gaze to the largest Dragonship. It was only a storm. The Western Isles were said to suffer from huge windstorms. Perhaps that gave them an eroded, maltreated air, with prekki trees that hunched over like old men before the prevailing winds, and rock formations carved by the constant struggle against the elements. Anyways, this battle would be over long before the lightning and hail arrived.
Yolathion eyed the largest Dragonship with equal unhappiness, although for different reasons. “I remember capturing you with one of those.”
“That was quite a battle.”
“But I beat you,” he replied, with a tight smile. “I beat a Dragon, whereupon a Princess of Immadia appeared before my eyes and jumped off my Dragonship.”
“You can just erase that image from your memory.”
His grin widened. “Why?”
“Zip was dying. That’s the only reason you caught us. If my Rider had been well, we would’ve taken you out with the Pygmy bow and kept on flying all the way to Immadia.”
“Besides,” Yolathion retorted, patently irked by her response, “you were covered in so much blood I barely recognised you. Neither the most flattering nor romantic image I have of you, Princess. Why can’t you just admit when you’re beaten? Why does everything need to be a battle with you?”
Stung, Aranya surged forward, closing with the Sylakian Dragonship fleet. Flame filled her body and mind, crackling in her ears and sparking from her nostrils.
“What happened to that sweet girl I danced with in the Tower?”
Aranya roared, “She became a Dragoness! You just don’t get it, do you? I’m still that girl, but I’m also a Dragon. It’s all me, all Aranya.”
“Now’s hardly the best time–”
“No, because everything’s a battle with you!”
The Amethyst Dragon cleaved the air with the force of her passage. Yolathion could not get the spark-stone working to light his oil pot, especially as she side-slipped three crossbow quarrels and then lifted dramatically to dodge a glittering spray of metal shards shot from the Dragonships’ catapults. Human-Aranya always had a temper. Her Dragon form made controlling her anger almost impossible–the overwhelming effect of adrenalin, the responsiveness of her fires and her emotions flaring and falling like sparks soaring from a bonfire, the power of a body and mind primed for hunting, battling and killing–she had to learn control. Otherwise, she’d hurt someone she loved.
“Rolling,” she warned Yolathion.
Aranya spiralled to her port flank, doing her utmost to confuse the catapult engineers as she feinted for one of the smaller Dragonships, before abruptly homing in on the largest. Intense blue fire seared out of her throat, the biggest fireball she had ever produced. It struck the windroc symbol on the side of the Dragonship squarely on the beak.