Authors: Marc Secchia
Dragon Thief
By Marc Secchia
Copyright © 2015 Marc Secchia
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher and author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover art copyright © 2015 Marc Secchia & Joemel Requeza
Cover font design by Victorine Lieske
Chapter 14: Business as Unusual
Chapter 24: Felonious Fickleness
Chapter 26: All in a Day’s Burglary
Chapter 29: Revenge Served Fiery
Chapter 30: Big Dragons don’t Cry
Chapter 33: Dragons of the West
Chapter 35: Slumbering Dragons
K
AL The THIEF
regarded the treasure hoard, head askance. One problem with this picture.
Mounds of lustrous Dragon gold, aye. Jewels fit to furnish any kingdom he cared to name, aye. Several kingdoms, in fact. As a man who boasted a certain amount of experience in such matters–his long fingers becoming inordinately sticky around gemstones and sundry valuables, for instance, those kept by kings in supposedly impregnable vaults–he was qualified to know. Kal assessed this haul as a career criminal’s dream. He need never steal again. Sadly, Kal was also wanted on a sizeable selection of major Islands in connection with being the type of man to possess such knowledge.
That, and there might have been several incidents related to the type of problem which confronted him now. Perhaps. He could not rightly say.
Kal tugged fiercely on his beard. Much more fiercely, and he’d uproot his facial hair like a fowl plucked for the spit. “Windroc gizzards,” he whispered, almost inaudibly. His eyes roamed the cavern. He saw no Dragon, which had to be positive news. The less positive news was the girl.
A most agreeably nude girl slept on the pile of gold nearest his right hand, so serene. She had the longest eyelashes he had ever seen.
That was not the problem, either.
Kal was an unusual man for one in his line of business, to wit, reapportioning the Island-World’s wealth in ways which might be alleged to benefit his sole proprietorship of all things shiny and precious. He was tall and rangy, with jet black hair tending toward a hint of grizzle, and a tanned face with, nowadays, more than a hint of grizzle. His voice was gruff, and foremost among his weapons when it came to talking himself out of situations which had become rather stickier than his admittedly sticky fingers could handle. Explorer, buccaneer, inveterate wealth adjuster, risk taker, rescuer of maidens in distress and those in not quite so much distress, and indeed, compulsive dabbler with the comely owners of the carefully selected jewellery and fine art which graced his private collection, located on a conveniently anonymous Island in the dense, expansive Southern Archipelago.
Dabbling had been in scant supply recently. A mildly pressing concern, but that could wait.
This Dragon’s lair had been ten years in the finding. Kal had persevered longer than most people would consider prudent or even sane, teasing fact from legend, and clues from ancient scrolls he had discovered in a little-used library on Ya’arriol Island–a library little frequented because it was guarded by a tribe of fanatical, Dragon-worshipping warrior monks, who also happened to possess a disturbing flair for magic. As a result, he now knew more about the Path of the Dragon Warrior than was healthy for a professional of his ilk. Two years had passed in punishment for his transgression. Jailed over a pile of dusty scroll lore? Bah.
But Kal had reaped certain benefits. One, he was superbly fit as a result of a diet of daily forced labour and meals restricted to fruits, vegetables and grain. Two, he had picked up a smattering of Dragonish, just enough to be dangerous. Three, he had discovered a magical legacy of his own–Ha’athiorian grandmother, was the story. On Kal’s fifth birthingday, the plague snatched his mother. His father was apparently a merchant–make that smuggler–from the Fingers of Ferial, who perished beneath the claws of a feral Dragon a year and a day after his mother’s death. Clearly, Kal was his father’s son in his predilection for objectionable occupations, and his mother’s likeness in height and beauty. Meant with all modesty, of course. He also took after his maternal ancestors in magic. Lighting a fire with a snap of one’s fingers had to be an improvement over fighting with spark-stones.
Kal rolled his shoulders silently. One should not allow a tragic past to shadow the present.
The monks had kindly allowed him to borrow a solo Dragonship and sail off into another enchanted suns-set of Fra’anior’s almighty volcano, which rose out of the deathly Cloudlands like a wart on a toad’s slimy backside–aye. Perhaps a man ought to deal in truths. He had stolen a Dragonship, supplies and coin. Then, a stormy evening concealed his departure from the breathtaking, league-tall volcanic ramparts of Ya’arriol Island, just a few hours shy of Fra’anior’s main volcano. Four days later, while fleeing from a cannibal tribe of Yaya Loop, one legend that evidently contained a grain more truth than he fancied, Kal happened upon a scrap of scrolleaf tucked into the Dragonship stove’s supply of ooliti wood.
‘May the sulphurous blessings of the Great Black Dragon, Fra’anior, supply you with all strength, o Kallion, my son,’
the note had said, inked in Master Ja’amba’s careful runic script. ‘
Seize your destiny!’
Roaring rajals! He had no idea what the old monk–bless his bald, tattooed pate–purposed by this cryptic message.
A further three months’ journeying and scouring the Cloudlands had brought him to this improbable scrap of rock. First, he had sailed down to Jeradia. He traversed the Spine Islands to Sylakia where an affluent merchant had unwittingly parted with two sacks of jewels to fund this madcap venture, while the honour of his frolicsome daughter–well, besmirched was a crude word. Kal smirked at a chest containing a king’s ransom in rubies. ‘Delicately plucked’ had a certain ring, didn’t it? Sadly interrupted mid-frolic, Kal had been hounded off Sylakia Island, bolting southeast over Telstroy to vanish in the Crescent’s steamy jungles. That merchant had been persistent, and the four Dragonships-worth of pesky bounty hunters he had despatched to bother Kal, even more so. Having shaken the bounty hunters off into the jungles by dint of regrettable use of force, Kal had taken in the sights all the way south to Remoy–now, a man could consider settling there. They took four wives! A most refined custom, and a sign of an enlightened society, he felt. Except, he was far more the frolicking than the settling sort.
Taking off from Remoy Island, Kal had sailed East into the great unknown, the uninhabited Southern Sea that some said led to the Eastern Archipelago’s tail end–or not. The maps were less than clear on that point, being disturbingly blank and expansively so.
Bar this unmarked spit of rock. After a week aloft spent quartering the endless reaches of the Cloudlands below the Islands, he had discovered this ancient Dragon-roost. Mooring his solo Dragonship in a rocky cleft, Kal tarried a further two weeks, fully expecting the Dragon to emerge. Nothing. However, a single, fresh paw-print outside the cave stood as a stark reminder to an overconfident opportunist of the risks he essayed as he crept inside. The paw-print was taller than his six feet and five inches. Considerably taller.
Presently, that particular paw-print lay several thousand feet behind his back. Kal did not fancy his chances of outrunning a Dragon, although a fireball warming one’s rump was said to exert miraculous powers of endeavour.
His gaze tripped back to the girl, moth to her candle. She was long and lean, all statuesque sinuosity a balladeer could praise the day long. No waif, this one. Also an endearing trait, aside from her alluring pose and the fact that she evidently considered actual clothing far too conservative for her taste.
Volcanic
, he told himself in Dragonish. This time, he did not whisper. He spoke a thought in his mind, for Dragonish could be spoken verbally or telepathically. Her hair was a mass of dark swirls, gleaming blue-black in the cave’s dim light, which emanated from four braziers perched at intervals between scattered piles of jewels and gold drals and treasure chests and silver armour–enough light to ascertain that this cave was a dead end, and the fetching fireflower was its only inhabitant. Unforeseen. Yet … troubling. Any of this would have been fine, even gladdening, on an ordinary day.
The problem lay in the way she was sleeping.
Aye, some subtle quality of her posture alerted Kal’s squirming gut that what he had walked into was not only a sticky mess, but sticky in the sense of, his bones might end up sticking out of his skin and the sticky bits would be his blood and entrails and so forth.
Was she a Dragon, disguised? A phantasm of draconic magic? For surely, no mortal woman could own such perfection. Being a man of avowed expertise in this field of study, he should know.
Kal appraised the young beauty, which was no hardship. He saw nothing obvious to back up his theory. She did not transform into an aged hag on examination. Far from it. Nor did she develop scales and a severe case of fiery halitosis. And those improbably shapely eyelashes … Kal. Concentrate. He chewed his lip as if it were a strip of rubbery, overcooked trout. No. Could the dilemma, the almost-magical chill misting his neck-flesh with a touch like whetted steel, be encapsulated in how her hand curled carelessly around a ruby-encrusted princess’ tiara, or the way those lithe legs scissored into cascades of gold coins as though she owned them for a blanket?
She was definitely a woman in the most refined, curvilinear sense of the word. Kal briefly considered sprinting out of the cave, screaming like a demented windroc all the way, and tossing himself off the cliffs to his certain doom in the perpetual cloudscapes half a league beneath the Island. How many steps would he succeed in taking along that path–three? Four?
Also, she was not really sleeping. Kal sighed.
Only her chest stirred, a poem to rondure. Could he talk the fiendish owner of that sublime pulchritude out of supping on his entrails? He was rather attached to what usually resided inside of his hide.
Kal sighed again. Louder.
Within, he cursed the fates, the Islands, each of the five moons and the greed which had spurred a humble sailor like him to fly to this dismal spit of rock. Dismal, save for this lethal beauty. She was worth every one of the remaining seconds of his rapidly expiring mortal existence.
He shuffled his boots pointedly, but did not budge an inch toward freedom.
The girl’s eyes snapped open.
Kal very nearly blurted out a regrettable word. Her eyes were depthless, far older than her body appeared, wells of an exotic blue so lambent, they shone like veiled lanterns in the semidarkness.
“Islands’ greetings on this fine morn,” she said.
Kal wanted to protest that it was not morning. It was the middle of the night, aptly named the thieves’ hour. He wanted to say that as the girl sat up, sending runnels of gold drals tinkling about her feet, that she was as stunning as a jet-black rajal caught in the instant of pouncing on her prey. She was utterly unselfconscious of her nudity. Utterly sure of herself. And that was how he was utterly certain he was about to become Kallion, recently deceased.
What the girl’s connection to the Dragon might be, he was less certain. But in his profession, any obsessive purloiner wishing to preserve his hide for longer than a gnat’s sneeze soon learned to heed his danger sense. Right now, a strident voice in Kal’s head squealed, ‘Danger! Danger! Danger!’ but his feet seemed to be immobilised by ten-tonne shackles.
His inability to form a coherent word amused the girl. Melodiously, with unshuttered humour, she inquired, “Well? To what do I owe the pleasure, stranger? I hope you weren’t planning to steal this treasure?”
“Steal?” He managed to sound offended, even if it was at an embarrassingly shrill pitch. “I’m no thief.”
“Out for a morning stroll, perchance?”
Kal swallowed. Her smile seemed to sprout fangs; although he was convinced this was the overtime workings of his sweaty and feverish imagination, it was a compelling impression.
“The air being fresher out here, five hundred leagues from the nearest habitation of Human or Dragon, than in most other corners of our beautiful Island-World?” She nibbled a strand of her blue-black hair, playing the coquette. “Where are your manners, good thief?”
In an attempt to disguise the horror burrowing beneath his hide like the frenzied efforts of a thousand cockroaches, Kal swept into a Fra’aniorian courtly bow, which was an extravagant production worthy of a troop of professional stage actors trained to perform for royalty. “Kallion the adventurer at your service, mighty … uh, lady … I hail from Fra’anior Cluster where … they call me Kal for short …”
Her smile only multiplied his stupefaction until she rescued him with a murmur, “Oh, Fra’anior? Life on the rim of an active volcano must be very exciting.”
“Exciting,” he repeated, sounding as thick as the plank he called an instrument of speech. Kal! Where was his golden tongue? “And … diverting.”
“Diverting?”
“Extremely diverting,” said Kal, reddening as honesty–blast it into a Cloudlands volcano–took control of his flapping tongue and the direction of his gaze simultaneously.
Her brow furrowed. “And you, Kal of Fra’anior, are the kind of man to be diverted two thousand leagues from home in search of–”
“Beauty!” he yelped. “Beauty which outshines the matchless suns-rise gleam upon Rolodia Island’s renowned terrace lakes.”
Better. Maybe he was not a babbling dragonet after all.
“Oh.” The girl preened, stretching for the cavern’s roof in a manner that put his shirt in danger of bursting into flame, and said, “I do hope you weren’t planning a spot of plundering and pillaging, Kal, because I’m very attached to my treasure.”
‘My?’ his mind wailed. Never had two letters served to so terrify a man. Kal spluttered, “Not treasure, oh no. Can’t stand gold, it’s so cold and heavy–”
“But you are a thief.”