Shadowed By Wings (2 page)

“Get up!”

I scrambled to my feet, legs unsteady, breath thready and cold. I looked about the ground, seeking the tunic the dragonmaster had demanded I shuck, so I could be inducted into his apprenticeship through ritual whipping. It was that which had spurred the crowd into murderous indignation, see: my nakedness, and my female gender.

The garment was nowhere in sight.

“Walk over to the bar,” the dragonmaster barked.

I gaped at him.

He meant to whip me, to continue with the annual ritual of Mombe Taro whether or not he had spectators and apprentices, with or without the pageantry and ritual. He still meant to induct me into his apprenticeship.

Fear and triumph shot through me in equal measures.

It wasn’t too late to back out, to flee. After all, women did
not
enter the apprenticeship of a dragonmaster, and as a woman of seventeen years, I would be defying centuries of tradition by allowing myself to be inducted into dragonmaster Re’s apprenticeship.

But if I fled, I would never again experience the heady splendor of dragon venom, would never again taste its licorice-and-lime effervescence. Would never get another chance to share myself with a dragon and hear divine dragonsong.

So, of course, I wouldn’t flee.

Trembling, mouth so dry I couldn’t swallow, I walked over to the whipping bar. I was intensely aware of my nakedness and felt exposed and highly vulnerable. As I walked, my bare feet raised clouds of the red dust unique to my birth Clutch. It was warm, that dust, and powdery. A caress, almost. I pictured myself clothed in it.

Behind me, I heard Waikar Re Kratt exchange words with the dragonmaster.

An epiphany struck me: Custom dictated that a dragonmaster’s apprentice could not be inducted or reinstated into his apprenticeship by the dragonmaster himself, and that the ritual whipping had to be done by other hands. It would therefore be Kratt who would lay leather against my back.

Nausea rushed over me, and I stumbled and would have fallen if not for the whipping bar that ran, hip high, down the median of the Lashing Lane. I gripped the smooth wood of the bar tightly and forced myself to breathe in, breathe out.

The whipping bar was the color of wild honey, and it was slick with consecrated oil yet furred here and there with red dust. It had been carved to resemble a sinuous, impossibly long dragon, and amongst the bar’s labyrinthine wooden scales, contorted human shapes leered at me. From the corner of one eye, I saw Kratt ride over to a section farther along the whipping bar and tether his lathered, exhausted beast.

I was going to get what I wanted most now.

Venom.

Yet that venom would be imparted by a whip, a whip wielded by someone I had vowed to kill, someone I feared and hated, someone who had murdered my father, sent my mother down the spiraling path of insanity, and destroyed my childhood.

“Mo Fa Cinai, wabaten ris balu,” I murmured.
Purest Dragon, become my strength.

I closed my eyes.

The dragons entangled in the smashed carriages farther down the lane lowed in fear and pain. I heard wood splinter and chain clank, smelled the burning-oil stench of agitated dragon. Women and children were crying. Some distance away, a pack of feral dogs howled, their syncopated yelps and yowls eerie.

I heard footsteps approaching me from behind. Steady. Soft. They moved without hurry.

My pulse sped up.

The footsteps stopped.

I heard a slithering, raspy sound: a whip uncoiling.

My fingers tightened on the bar. I could not breathe properly. I started panting. My bare back and buttocks crawled with dread anticipation; I could feel every muscle clenching tighter, tighter.

The waiting stretched on. And on.

Mo Fa Cinai, wabaten ris balu, I repeated in my mind. Mo Fa Cinai, wabaten ris balu.

Then a near-silent whisper flicked over the air, and leather cracked near my ear. I jumped, eyes flying open, and a scream escaped me.

Another long pause. I grew giddy.

Crack!

Leather snapped near my other ear, without touching, though my hair wafted a little in the breeze the whip made. Again I jumped and screamed, couldn’t help it, and suddenly I was filled with fury, for I was being toyed with by a sadist who’d once smashed my mother’s jaw, over and over, beneath his boot heel, and I would
not
play his vicious game; I would
not
.

As always, I didn’t hold my tongue when I should have.

“You dragon-sucking screw!” I shrieked as I whirled about. “Don’t you feel man enough to whip me properly? Don’t you feel strong enough, brave enough, unless I’ve pissed myself in fear first?”

For one volcanic moment, we stared at each other, Kratt and I, his cold blue eyes boring into my brown ones. Then his whip moved, and a breathtaking pain sliced the skin below my left breast, and then another gashed me between the legs, reaching up under my sex and cracking against my tailbone so hard that I swore bone fractured. I screamed and spun away from the whip, lurched into the whipping bar, which I’d forgotten about, almost fell over it.

And still that whip fell.

It stung, it burned, and my breath came ragged and fast as my chest rose and fell, rose and fell, beneath my head, which I instinctively covered with my arms. Eight times only a dragonmaster’s apprentice should be whipped during induction. Eight times. But Kratt’s whip fell far, far more often than that upon my naked body.

With each whip fall, my screams intensified, till they burst from my mouth like shrieking birds, and the whip no longer stung or thudded but landed like a shard of ice, the sensation like that of being splashed with boiling oil: that moment when it feels not hot, but intensely cold, and then not cold or hot but another sensation entirely, one that can be described only as keen agony.

The whip falls smashed against me like fists, bit as deep as hurled knives. Each strike jerked my entire body and burned iced flame into the marrow of my bones.

Suddenly, the world tipped. Hardpan slammed against my knees. My forehead thudded slowly, slowly against dirt, and I was confused and felt poised on the lip of complete vertigo. Grit coated my tongue. A salty, metallic fluid filled my mouth.

“Stop, please stop.”

Not me, choking the words out from a throat so raw that each word tasted of blood. Surely not me. I was stronger than that, would never beg for mercy from this man, of all men.

For an answer: silence.

Stillness.

Then.

Black boots coated in fine red dust floated before my face. Fading. Oscillating. Beneath my cheek hot earth pulsed. A thready whine filled my ears. A hand caught my hair, jerked my face off the ground.

Blue glistened before me: the sky. No. An eye. Two eyes.
His
eyes. The eyes of Kratt. Above those eyes, hair the color of sun-blanched almonds, dusted with golden cane sugar.

The hand released me. My head plunged groundward, downward, tumbling and spinning, falling forever.

Thud!
My cheek struck earth.

Darkness, with a pinpoint of blinding light at its center.

The point of light grew, pulsing. The darkness receded. From the center of the light grew a face. Not Kratt’s face, no. This one was deeply lined, was the piebald color of dried herbs and bark. Gray eyebrows as thin as desiccated millipedes furrowed at me beneath a bald, scarred head. I stared into the eyes of that face; they were marbled with blood.

The face slewed sideways. Blinding light again, and sensation returned in excruciating swiftness to my body.

Agony across my flayed back, across my calves and rump. Agony as I lay belly down in the dust, one cheek pressed against hot ground, the sun’s angry eye glaring directly into mine as I continued the agonizing process of returning to consciousness.

That blood-eyed face loomed again into the light; it grinned at me. It was a knowing grin, a grin possessing the wisdom of the insane. The drawn lips exposed listing and rotted teeth, gums speckled with bruises. Below that leer dangled a chin braid garnished with a green toggle.

“Bite,” said the face.

Sunlight shone on something wet and black: a whip. The whip’s handle was shoved crosswise into my mouth. And then …

Oh, then.

A slow effervescence on my tongue, tasting like licorice and limes. A subsequent burning, so beautiful and complete it set my mouth and throat aflame, sent pain-dulling heat roaring through my nose, my eyes, my ears.

Dragon venom. Sweet, forbidden dragon venom.

The agony of my flayed back and calves guttered as the analgesic hallucinogen filtered through my blood.

But no, I should not taste venom! I had forsworn the illicit drug in my quest to seek vengeance against Kratt. Yet I could no more prevent myself from swallowing the venom than I had been able to prevent myself from begging for mercy from the whip. Some things are greater than noble aspirations, more powerful than determination. Some would call it instinct. Some, magic.

Others, addiction.

So I did what I had to do to end the overwhelming agony, and as I sucked, my pain-induced dizziness cleared and I recognized the piebald green-and-brown face leering at me: the dragonmaster.

He patted my head as though I were a dog, took the whip from my mouth, and stood.

“Who is she?” Kratt said. He stood above me, a whip’s length away, panting from the exertion of flailing me.

“ ‘Who is she?’ ” the dragonmaster parroted. “You’ve whipped her on the lane during Mombe Taro. She is, therefore, my apprentice—”

“Don’t dissemble, old man.”

“She’s the one I told you about,” the dragonmaster grunted. “The Dirwalan Babu.”

Dirwalan Babu. The Skykeeper’s Daughter, in the ancient Malacarite tongue.

“What proof have you?” Kratt growled.

“Other than the holy will of Re, which directs me?”

“Yes.”

“Other than that which you witnessed just now?”

A momentary silence from Kratt as he glanced up to where the Skykeeper had disappeared.

He looked down at me again. His eyes were cold and penetrating, made of turquoise and quartz. I closed my lids against them.

“She knows venom,” Kratt said slowly. “Knows it well, to have sucked the whip so.”

“You suppose?” the dragonmaster said dryly; then he roared with laughter. Behind my closed lids, I saw the laughter as a rainfall of jewels, sharp and multicolored, tasting of iron and coal. I felt a flicker of fear, quickly soothed by the venom coursing through me. The dragonmaster’s laughter bespoke years of exposure to venom and his inner battle to retain his sanity. Any who’d oft imbibed the dragons’ liquid fire would recognize the sound.

“She’ll die for this travesty, Komikon,” Kratt said, his voice low and dark. “No woman can serve the bull, and no one should know venom as well as she.”

“Not even one of my apprentices?”

“Don’t play me for a fool. Temple will scythe her down before the sun sets on this day.”

“You’ll stay the execution,” the dragonmaster said angrily.

“Will I?”

“By all that is sacred, you
must
stay her execution; we agreed upon it!”

“You would have me defy Temple over a myth that no one but you knows.”

“It is a prophecy as real as the creature that just flew over us. Few know of it.”

I could smell the tension between the two men, the clash of wills as pungent as the musk male mongooses emit in combat. I lifted my cheek from the ground a little, head numb with venom, and squinted into the sunlight. The two men stood facing each other, inches apart. Waikar Re Kratt still breathed heavily from having whipped me, his flaxen hair a brilliant crown in the sun, his eyes polished beryls, his high cheekbones and chiseled nose the essence of power and calculating might. The dragonmaster stood half-crouched as if to spring at him, was naked save for a stained leather loincloth, every inch of his sinewy, mottle-colored body crisscrossed with white scars.

Kratt turned away from the dragonmaster and walked the few paces to me, his leather boots falling softly upon dusty hardpan. With the languid ease of a jungle cat, he squatted on his haunches and regarded me.

“Her mouth should be blistered from that venom,” he murmured. “She should be choking to death. Frothing. Spewing blood.”

“She knows venom,” the dragonmaster said simply, repeating the very words Kratt had used moments before.

“Who are you, rishi whelp?” Kratt cocked his head to the side. His were the dulcet tones used to sing a child to sleep, but those piercing blue eyes belied the temperate sound. “Who are you, that you know venom so well?”

I tried to summon enough saliva to spit in his face but could not. Neither could I find the courage, not with the wounds on my back so fresh and the memory of pain so immediate.

“I asked you a question, rishi whelp. Answer it.”

“Zarq,” I croaked. “I am Zarq.”

“Is that so? A woman bearing the name of Malacar’s legendary warrior. An unusual piece of refuse, then.” Amusement curled his lips, but his eyes did not join the mirth. “Can you summon that bird at will, hmm? That Skykeeper?”

“Yes,” I lied, my eyes never wavering from his.

“Summon it now.”

“Can’t.” Venom lent me the inspiration to fabricate. “The effort would kill me, in this state.”

“What state?”

He wanted to hear how fiercely he’d wounded me, was poised for such. I would not give him that satisfaction.

From the stable end of the Lashing Lane, where lay the wreckage of overturned carriages, came voices and the answering snorts and bellows from the entrapped dragons. People were beginning to emerge whence they’d hidden in stable and doorway, and I could hear them approaching the smashed carriages, calling out to the wounded.

Kratt’s eyes did not flicker from my face.

“Could you summon that Skykeeper in Arena, rishi whelp, were you to survive the apprenticeship long enough to make it there?”

“I’ll survive long enough,” I said, with more conviction than I felt. “And the Skykeeper obeys my will.”

“Does it.” He looked away from me and stared down the lane, as if he might descry the future from its dusty length.