H
unagu never spoke
about the dream. For all she knew, he did not remember his sickness. Pip threw herself into caring for him. The great Ape began to shovel his food into his maw with his usual zest, and was soon swinging his way up the climbing frame again.
Pip studied maps of the Island-World, trying to work out a way of returning home. She would escape. She would steal a Dragonship. The only bit of poison in the Cloudlands, as the saying went, was the matter of a war raging between her and her goal. She continued her studies with Master Balthion, while Duri and Arosia left for their different schools. Balthion instructed her in advanced forms of Sylakian swordplay and taught her how the different Islands had come to be friends or enemies.
In the summer following Hunagu’s illness, Balthion began to mutter about a disturbance among the Dragon-kind.
“Too many wings over this Island,” he grumbled. “The Sylakians are on high alert. All of my old friends in the army are saying that the Dragons are searching for something.”
“There have been many Dragons overhead,” Pip agreed. “Reds, Yellows, even a Blue.”
She did not mention the being she had come to think of as the Dragon of Shadow. Recently, the nightmares had returned with renewed power, so much so that Pip did not know if she had imagined another passage of the creature nearby, or not. Was it real? Or spirit? Or simply a figment of her overworked imagination? She was unsure she truly wanted to know.
“Blue? Name the Blue Dragon powers,” Balthion shot back at once.
“Blues specialise in water and lightning attacks. And Dragon fire, obviously.”
“Name the forms of lightning.”
“Direct strike, sheet lightning and ball lightning,” said Pip.
“And?”
“Um … what do you mean, Master?”
“There’s one more. Rare. The most dangerous of the lightning-based attacks.”
Pip scratched her head. “Oh … the one that jumps?”
“Chain lightning, ay. Good, Pip.” He patted her on the shoulder. “But I sense my pupil has a question. Out with it, before it burns your tongue.”
“Dragons are good, right, Master Balthion?”
Balthion showed his surprise with a testy snort. “Ay? As all Humans are good? So slave traders and zookeepers, and War-Hammers, for that matter, are all good? Pip, this Island-World can be a bad, unfair place, and you know that better than most. Don’t you go thinking Dragons are any better than Humans. They say that some Dragons long for a return to the good old days when Humans were slaves and Dragons ruled the Island-World from the frozen Isles of the North to the deep South, past the Rift to Herimor and beyond. There are feral Dragons–those who have lost all reason and exist only as the wildest of predators, intent on destruction–and evil Dragons with evil Dragon Riders, who prey on the unwary and the defenceless.”
Pip chewed on her lip. “But, how can a Dragon become feral?”
Balthion nodded. “Good question. From the loss of a beloved Rider, some say, or old age, or when the rage of battle overcomes their good sense. Riders or other Dragons can restore a feral Dragon to their right mind. But it is a dangerous undertaking.”
“Master, I thought the Dragons were defeated in the Second Great Dragonwar?”
“Ah.” Balthion’s expression turned solemn. “So they were, Pip, some sixty-three summers ago. But this generation of Dragons has forgotten that war and why it was fought. They wonder why some puny Humans should rule the Islands, rather than the mighty Dragon-kind. Dragons are dangerous, Pip. Too many people think they are just like us. Dragons are mighty, untameable beasts of fire and magic. That will never change.”
Pip pondered Balthion’s words long after he left, until the evening grew old and the cloudless night sky filled with stars–unusually, for one of the five moons was always present in the sky, except for three nights of the year. She slept restlessly, her dreams filled with chaotic images and baffling portents.
With the state of high alert of Sylakia Island’s troops, Pip noticed a drop in the number of visitors to the zoo. Fine. She could do without the stares. So it was, when the stranger approached her cage, that Pip hardly noticed him. The back of her neck prickled. Pip resisted. Let whoever it was just stare. Seven summers of roving eyeballs had armoured her skin. Now the backs of her knees itched. She scratched the skin with a hiss of annoyance, but immediately returned to lining up pieces of bamboo for her latest project, a pan-flute. After reading about pan-flutes in a history of the Southern Islands near the Rift, she had decided to make one for herself.
Turn around.
The whisper in her mind practically nailed her feet to the ground. What? Pretending a calm she did not feel, Pip tilted her head to scan the crysglass windows.
Her eyes leaped to a blue-eyed stranger. He stood right up against the glass. He was as old as the trees of her jungle, a shaggy, white-haired man of yellowish skin and nondescript clothes–but his eyes! From beneath the brim of a floppy, torn farmer’s hat, they pierced right through her heart as if twin beams of starlight blazed from his eye-sockets.
His lips did not move, but again, a voice formed in her mind.
Are you the one?
Before she could stop herself, Pip snapped,
Get out of my head, you creep.
Ah.
That was all he said. One syllable, and Pip knew she had been discovered–only, she had no idea what it meant or what had been discovered. The blue eyes lidded over whatever secrets they concealed. The old man shuffled off, making surprising speed despite using two canes to support his unwilling knees.
Pip glowered at his back, panting, her fists painfully knotted.
“Pip not happy,” said Hunagu, moving over to lay his paw across her shoulders. He was careful not to crush her to her knees, which he could do easily.
“Strange man,” said Pip, releasing her fury with a shudder, until only hollowness was left within her soul. “See? He speak inside Pygmy girl’s head, not like normal person.”
“He bad man?”
Pip laid her hands on his paw. “Hunagu, Pip don’t know. Pip … worried.”
“He speak magic,” said Hunagu.
Magic. Pip fretted all day long about the creepy man with his sneaking voice. If he could speak inside her head, could he read her thoughts? Corrupt her mind? Enslave her in ways she had never been enslaved before? Now there was a thought to curdle the stomach.
She watched the crysglass windows, but he did not return before evening, when the park shut to visitors. She felt no relief, only endless Cloudlands of despair. Why?
Pensively, Pip pulled out the razor ribbons Arosia had gifted her–a gift the zoo owner should not know about–and tucked them beneath the rolled-up rajal fur she used for a pillow. If only she could have spoken to Arosia or Balthion for reassurance. Hunagu acted unconcerned, but she did notice that when he crept beneath their shelter, he moved closer to her than usual and tucked her protectively into the crook of his arm. She felt as jumpy as a locust tossed into a frying pan. Pip willed herself to settle down. The pressure behind her ears was just a headache. She had not drunk enough water. Or bathed for several weeks, she reminded herself.
The wind rose. Her sniff brought her knowledge of a hint of moisture in the air and a metallic tang. Perhaps a storm was brewing. That was it. Finally, Pip’s eyes lidded. After last night’s disturbed sleep she could do with a good, deep … what was that? Her eyes popped wide open as the net lifted off their enclosure. Ropes groaned and tore out of their moorings. Two of the supporting poles disappeared with the net, up into the air, past the roof of their shelter and out of sight.
“Hunagu. Wake up.”
“Hmm?”
She felt a jolt pass through his body. Hunagu’s danger-sense, like hers, had just come awake–screaming awake.
“Stay down,” growled the Ape. “Hunagu protect Pygmy girl.”
Pip scrabbled for the ribbon daggers. She had never felt so terrified, so aware that something huge was lowering out of the sky and it was not a bird, nor a Dragonship, but a creature whose unseen presence made her feel like an ant crawling beneath a gigantic jungle tree.
Was it the hunting shadow, which had found her at last?
The grass swayed. Wind blasted dust into the air. Four enormous, gnarled paws thudded into the ground she had so often walked, followed by a dark red belly as broad as a Dragonship, and a spiked tail so heavy she felt its impact through her feet. With awful inevitability, a jaw descended toward them, furnished with fangs in the lower jawbone which were comfortably as tall as she was, and a neck as thick as Hunagu’s waist, and finally, a slit red eye that fixed their little shelter with a burning gaze.
Pip was certain her heart would never beat again. A Dragon!
Hunagu shrank against her. Pip had never known him to be cowed before, but the beast out there had to be ten times his size. Hunagu was a plant-eater. He was brave. But this was an enemy neither of them could possibly fight.
The fiery reptilian eye measured her with an ancient and terrible knowing, with a weight so forceful that her knees buckled and Pip had to catch herself before she fell prone. She wished the ground would snatch her into its depths, to hide her from that reaming gaze. Yet she lived. The Dragon did not attack her. He did not destroy her body or her soul.
For many breaths, there was only a silence which rang in her ears. Pip realised that she could hear a complicated rhythm nearby, a muffled drumbeat of Dragon-hearts. Three hearts, according to the legends. Some part of her mind was a gibbering, screaming wreck. Another seemed preternaturally calm. Perhaps that was the part which knew she was about to die, and nothing she could do would change her fate one iota.
“Well, don’t just hide in your shelter,” rumbled the Dragon. “Come out where I can see you, little one.”
Maybe he wasn’t hungry?
Pip cleared her throat. She quavered, “I’m q-quite c-comfortable right here.”
“The sulphurous greetings of the Dragon-kind to you, Pip’úrth’l-iòlall-Yò’oótha.”
The Dragon chuckled, which made flames curl out of his nostrils. His speaking voice was a low thunder that made her innards wobble most disturbingly. How did he know her name? How did he speak Ancient Southern so perfectly? He was as large as a living, breathing mountain fallen from the sky. And he smelled like a Pygmy barbecue pit, of old smoke and embers and a hint of sweet, roasted wild pig. The smell made her strangely homesick, in the midst of her much more sickening fear.
He added, “I read your name off your leg, little one. And I must add, it suits you from the heavens above to the Islands below. Though I expected you to be bigger than your average loaf of bread.” At this, he chuckled mightily, ruffling Hunagu’s fur with a brisk breeze. “Come. I have searched for you for months, all these long leagues between the Islands. We are leaving this zoo, tonight.”
Leaving?
Pip pushed past Hunagu and out into the open. Summoning her utmost daring, she demanded, “Who are you, Dragon? And why should I go with you?”
Her voice sounded tiny and pathetic next to his rumbling.
By way of reply, the Dragon stretched out his forepaw and placed it side-on next to Pip, the three long foreclaws and the two opposing ‘thumbs’ curling in toward her, and said, “I am Zardon, the Red Dragon. Even my paw is wider than you are tall. Is that not reason enough?”
Pip had to exercise every fibre of her willpower not to give in to the desire to bolt. There was nowhere to run to. The Dragon would trap her as a feline played with a mouse. Although the Dragon was old, she guessed, he still moved with agility and grace. The wall of his forepaw and its sword-length talons did not close about her. Was there a hint of amusement in Zardon’s mesmeric gaze?
Deliberately, she put her hands on her hips. “So I’m supposed to fly with you to fate unknown, lest you turn me into a Pygmy kebab?”
Zardon guffawed heartily, his laughter rattling the crysglass windows in their casements. He turned his head so that his fire did not sear her or Hunagu, though it set a thirty-foot strip of grass aflame. “You’re a feisty one.”
“Would you answer my question–uh, Lord Zardon … please?”
Pip lowered the finger she had just wagged at him. Islands’ sakes, that was like trying to halt a charging Oraial by waving a blade of grass at it. The Dragon stopped laughing. The eye narrowed, the scaly ridge above it drawing down until she realised he was about to say something important. She caught her breath.
Without warning, his head snapped sideways. Had he heard something? “They’re listening. They’ve followed me here.”
“Who’s listening?” Pip whispered.
“Them. Be still. They have eyes and ears everywhere,” he muttered. “I was careful. But was I careful enough?”
Pip had first thought back to the Shadow Dragon–with a creeping sensation as though a breath of ice had been breathed into her bones–but she realised that Zardon was talking about people, real living people with eyes and ears.
The Dragon raised his nose, testing the night air. His wings flared as though he faced an enemy. Pip could sense the strain in his body, the muscles quivering with readiness to fight or flee. His peculiar behaviour made her shiver. Then, without warning, his extended foreclaw slipped beneath her chin like a sword of the finest craftsmanship. He raised her gaze to his.