Dragon Thief (12 page)

Epic? Ignoring the superfluous verbiage, she was a heavenly being descended to the Isles! And if she was teasing, he’d slap her down to the status of a bottom-feeding carp.

Quickly, he said, “Kiss it all better?”

“In your nasty dreams, you depraved troublemaker. No, I was just wondering … no.”

Kal searched her eyes, dizzied by the marvellous fate which bound him to this incomparable woman. Surely, he dreamed. Surely, she could not desire the likes of … him?

A smile curved Tazithiel’s lips. “I saw fresh rockfall today.”

“Huh?” He managed a highly intelligent bleat.

“Tomorrow, we’re going Anubam-hunting. You need to see a burrowing Dragon, Kal. It’s a unique experience in this Island-World.”

“What does that have to do with a perfect volcanic suns-set over Fra’anior, which fires the skies forge-red, and bathes the world in beams of ruddy light so thick a man should wish to stroke them?”

She produced a pout of quivering magnificence. “Hunting? Tomorrow?”

“As you wish, o monumental sky-princess.”

“Kal, my Human form prefers rather less of the superlative size comparisons.” Kal set about kissing her pout back into the shape of a smile. “Ooh, stop … you pirate … no, I was thinking … or not thinking, you wretchedly … metagrobolising man …”

Aye, may she gasp! Kal admired his handiwork. He really was a great kisser.

“You! I’ll smack that little-boy smirk right off your face,” she huffed. Her cheeks flamed; heat radiated from her body. “You just filched an important thought right out of my–”

“Kinetic powers for healing,” Kal prompted, although he was not sure why.

Her eyes lit up. “Yes. Yes! You’re a mind-reading genius!” Well, this conversation was definitely heading in the right direction. Not only the fulsome compliments, but Kal loved it when Tazi frolicked about in happiness, for with a pinch of luck such behaviour might extend to the pillow-roll. “Although how exactly, escapes me. This isn’t the first time either.”

“You still aren’t making sense, woman.”

“Oh, I am.” Tazi fixed a ravishing smile upon him. “I’m going to think that infection right out of your nether regions.”

Instinctively, Kal covered the suddenly tingling essentials with his hands. “You are not starting some crazy experiment on my … no! Not there!”

“Poor Kal, I can hear your friends snickering already. This gorgeous Shapeshifter enchantress is begging you to drop your trousers and you’re running away in fear?”

“It’s the Island of wisdom!”

* * * *

After a few false starts, Tazithiel succeeded in improving matters below the belt, so to speak. Kal lost his precious dignity and by morning, gained a visible improvement to the burn which stretched from his right hip, three quarters of the way across his abdomen. The White Dragoness’ scale had protected him from a fate most horrific. He noted Tazithiel’s pensive glance when she spotted him storing the trinket in his belt-pouch.

That morning they flew low, hunting Anubam.

Burrowing Dragons. Kal knew a few legends. Tazithiel seemed confident, but she was a seventy-foot flying fortress. The Human on her back was decidedly more squishable. Kal had a healthy respect for anything that could quarry holes the size of what he saw in these Islands.

The Dragoness flitted from Island to Island, hunting for fresh Anubam-sign. She found a newly excavated ten-foot hole in the flank of a vast horizontal column. “Tiny,” she sneered. “No fun here.” Kal eyed the dark tunnel-mouth as they passed by. He was quite certain he saw burning eyes blink shut in the darkness, as if the creature within sensed his gaze. “Miniscule.” The Indigo Dragoness swished by another tunnel marked by a fresh landslide within which Kal spied numerous gemstones. Hmm. What did these Anubam eat, anyways? Could they be drawn out into the open?

Kal rooted though the saddlebags while Tazithiel imitated a dragonfly, darting from tunnel-mouth to tunnel-mouth. “This seems a busy Island,” she muttered. “I wonder where the mother of all Anubam might be?”

An affinity for gemstones had always fizzed in his blood. Kal extracted a fist-sized cluster of horiatite, the signature crystal of Ha’athior Island in his native Fra’anior Cluster, once a sacred Island of the Dragonkind but now inhabited by Humans. According to the Dragon lore the monks had taught him, an Ancient Dragon had once lived in the bowels of Ha’athior, a Dragon befriended by a Human girl. The mind boggled. Tazithiel was intimidating enough. Here, the Ancient Powers had toppled whole Islands and devastated them by the thousand.

If the time of the Ancient Dragons had passed, he wondered, how was it he had spoken to Fra’anior so clearly? What magic was that? For he sensed the Great Black Dragon was alive–somewhere, somehow. Imagine a titan like Fra’anior returning to the Island-World? He must dwarf the Islands.

Heavens above and Islands below, now he was worrying about mythical seven-headed tyrants from a past steeped in the blood and misery of Human slavery? Better to welcome a cataclysm that would swallow the entire Island-World into its fiery maw.

Kal raised the gemstone.
Come and get it …

The Indigo Dragoness flinched as though he had pierced her belly with a twenty-foot Dragon lance.
Kal–honestly, will you never learn? No Dragon’s stupid enough to be listening.

Bah. Fra’anior had calmed the storm on his request. Apparently. Perfectly true if a certain master battlement-dancer also had an ego as big and menacing as Tazi’s Shapeshifted Dragoness. That said, he had just developed an itching sensation on the nape of his neck, as though said Dragoness were drawing delicate circles on his skin with her daintiest talon. Kal scanned their surrounds. All was quiet. Caves and tunnels raddled the Islands as though they had been afflicted by some strange, wasting disease, and many Islands were merely mounded heaps of rock. Undermined and collapsed? Then where were the miners?

Tazithiel winged down a mile-long sandstone canyon which wriggled between two malformed, slumped-over Islands, just piles of stone fringed with withered brown bushes. Kal wriggled as though he had fire-ants in his trousers, which was a once-experienced, never to be repeated incident in his chequered past. A cunning trap in a vault on Seg Island, as he recalled–Kal’s dancing skills had attracted much ribald comment from the four female guards who turned up to apprehend the trespasser. Kal related the anecdote to the tune of chuckles from his mount.

Tazi inquired–how had he escaped? Kal suffered a coughing-fit.

“Let me guess,” the Dragoness growled, suddenly turning into a fire-stuffed hazard to all intelligent life, or at least to buccaneers with skills in more than lock-picking, “you seduced one of the guards, borrowed her keys and escaped in the dead of night, leaving her heartbroken and destitute and the vault, ransacked?”

Kal muttered, “Not destitute, anyways. I left her a diamond.”

“Oh, a diamond?”

“She was … sweet.”

“Sweet?” Tazithiel launched a fireball down a tunnel to their left. “That’s what you have to say?”

“Look! Something moved over there!”

“Coward,” the Indigo Dragoness snarled over her shoulder. “Don’t think you can avoid my wrath, o Kallion of Shrinking-Lily Island.”

Her heat was the stuff of riled belly-fires. But suddenly, the temperature in the canyon seemed to skyrocket. Tazithiel, unleashing one final fireball down the maw of a huge cavern bitten out of a sharp corner just ahead, stiffened perceptibly. Her wingbeat developed a hitch; their senses attuned as Dragon and Rider searched the menacing, bare rock-faces and yawning tunnel entrances which hemmed them in. Too close. Too restrictive. If it were possible for stillness to grow even stiller, they knew it for a fact. A stillness of oppressive disquiet, the only question not if, but when danger would avalanche over them.

Kal froze. His cry stuck in his craw for an endless moment. “Down, Tazi! Down!”

K
inETIC DRAGON-POWER
knocked them five Dragon-lengths downward. From their right flank, a sweeping section of stone exploded slowly, almost lazily, from the canyon wall as hundreds of brown, writhing bodies swam through the basal rock, not just creating an avalanche, but spraying Dragon-sized boulders hundreds of feet through the air with the force of their irruption. Razor-sharp pellets sprayed Kal’s side and left leg as he attempted to dodge, but of course found himself strapped in the saddle as he ought to be. Tazithiel performed evasive manoeuvres with a violent corkscrewing motion.
Snap!
Kal slewed onto her flank, saved by one remaining thigh-strap. The others had been severed by a peppering of dagger-sharp rock fragments.

The Indigo Dragoness unleashed a battle-challenge, dodging boulders at a terrific speed, before throwing up a shield. Brief, incomplete respite. Boulders rained down, battering the Dragoness and numbing Kal’s elbow.

More Anubam burst forth! The burrowing Dragons were brown or tan in colour with stubby legs and vestigial wings, strangely elongated creatures that suggested a blend of Dragon and snake. Rock shattered with sharp reports, while a guttural groaning resounded between the overarching walls, shaking Dragon and Rider bodily. Each Anubam’s roar was a strange series of guttural barks, so low they were almost subliminal, as though each creature possessed the capability to trigger an earthquake by the power of its voice alone.

“Suffering hells!” Kal swore. “Brace, Tazi!”

GRRRRAAAA … BOOM!

The Indigo Dragoness flapped wildly, but the mouth that burst out of the Island-wall ahead of them was three times wider than her wingspan, lined with granite-block teeth. The breath of its throat scorched Kal, even though he was fortunate to be dangling on the far side of his Dragoness. Lightning burst from Tazithiel’s mouth and claw-tips as she executed a desperate swerve to avoid the scooping bite of that orifice. Flap! Flap!

Kal screamed, “Go, Tazi! Away!”

The sky above vanished as a ridged cavern engulfed the foolhardy duo. The Dragoness’ roar turned into a wail as the Anubam’s jaw clamped down on her midsection. Crazy lights played across Kal’s vision. A shield? Was she holding a rock-chewing monster’s mouth open with her Kinetic power?

“Kal … get out!” Tazi groaned.

“I’m not leaving you!”

“Listen, you stubborn–
gaaaaaaaaahhh!
”

Listen? She spoke to the wrong man. Finding a sword in his hand, Kal slashed through the final thigh-strap. He slid down Tazi’s flank as those table-sized teeth ground against her backbone, yet somehow the Dragoness found the strength to withstand. Kal bounced on the Anubam’s rubbery lip just beyond what he realised was a triple row of the flat, spatulate teeth.

“Out! Jump!”

“I’m not jumping–” Kal reversed his sword “–into a canyon filled with–” he stabbed downward with all his strength “–flying worms!”

Nothing happened. Could he even hurt an animal this size? Yet Kal knew there must be a nerve buried somewhere beneath a lip as thick as a solo Dragonship’s air-sack. Another cry of pain from Tazi decided him. Stab! Hack! Twist and wrench! Kal set to work with the zest of a demented butcher. No beast was taking his girl!

“Accursed spawn of Dramagon!” he shrieked.
Enough!

Kal had in his mind a pleasing picture of a seven-headed Ancient Dragon turning this monster into a whopping Dragon-kebab. Unfortunately, that did not transpire. But he struck gold, so to speak–perhaps the very nerve he had wished for. With a shattering roar, the beast spat Tazithiel a thousand yards across the canyon. The row of close-fitting teeth, taller than his shoulder, spared Kal the brunt of the superheated blast, so he had time both to appreciate the fact that his already grizzled hair developed an instant layer of extra frazzle and that his Dragoness struck the far wall so hard, she bounced. Roaring rajals!

Smaller burrowing Dragons, ‘small’ denoting sizes upward of two hundred feet in length, it seemed, lunged out of the wall near Tazi. She batted them away with wild sprays of ice and lightning. Somehow the Indigo Dragoness managed to swim through a veritable terrace lake of lunging teeth, writhing bodies and waterfalls of boulders. Anubam separated from their native rock and fell screaming into the canyon. The Cloudlands would reap a harvest of death this day.

The mouth holding Kal began to grind shut. He did not pause to think. With a despairing cry, the thief enacted his best impression of a windroc as he hurled himself into space.

Sadly, his tribute to windrocs failed, for Kal demonstrated all the flying prowess of a brim-full wineskin. Plummeting, he wailed,
Taaaazzziiiiiii!

Oddly, against the rushing canyon walls, the boulders in his vicinity seemed to hover in the air. Were they falling at the same speed? Part of Kal’s mind insisted on debating the physics of this experience while the rest of him was bizarrely preoccupied with wondering how large a splodge of crimson a Human body would make on the rocks far below.

The incoming Dragoness described a blur of rainbow-coloured Dragon scales upon his vision. She outstripped the largest Anubam by a few wing-lengths as she roared down through the debris, carving a path with such speed that a bow-wave of debris preceded her. The monstrous, dun-coloured Anubam thundered after, its squat legs somehow gripping the rock with the ease of a gecko running across a ceiling. Boulders disappeared into a white-hot furnace visible deep in its gaping throat. Great Islands! That was their magic? Boulder-pulverising breath?

Tazi had to summon the mother of all Anubam, didn’t she?

Got you!

With a triumphant bellow, the Indigo Dragoness’ magic snagged his falling body, bouncing Kal heavily off a boulder before plastering him against her belly. The impact knocked the air clean out of his lungs. He did not care. Rough handling? Infinitely better than having his grin rearranged at the bottom of the canyon, wherever that was.

“Hold on!” yelled Tazithiel, swerving so forcefully that blackness washed over Kal’s vision.

Kal rattled about as boulders ricocheted off her flank. The monster Anubam lunged! But her speed was too great, throwing off the great lizard’s attempted interception.

Missed, you great worm!
Tazithiel crowed.

The Anubam curled into a ring, unreasonably flexible for such a monster, and hastened their departure with a roasting blast from its throat, melting boulders into slag and superheated vapour before Kal’s startled gaze. Tazi jinked rapidly, weaving a safe course through the boulders and the freakishly large ‘baby’ Anubam which charged out of their caverns and tunnels in a bid to hack off pieces of prey. Hot air punched their bodies cruelly as the massed ranks of Anubam grumbled their fury in low, Island-shaking chorus.

The Indigo Dragoness did not hold back. Ignominiously, Dragon and Rider fled the scene of their defeat.

* * * *

“Nice bruises,” Kal complimented Tazithiel. Her entire abdomen was ringed with one great bruise, while she sported a decent stippling of other contusions on her arms, shoulders and left cheek.

“You’re not so pretty yourself,” she replied.

“Nothing new there.”

“The only change being the degree of ugliness?” she needled.

Kal held up Chemi’s pot of ‘magic ointment’ she had insisted accompany them on their travels. “However, I know exactly how to make you purr.”

Human-Tazi smiled wanly at his joke. “We were pretty stupid today, weren’t we, Kal? Me with firing fireballs into Anubam caves and you with waving that crystal around. Let’s not do that again, shall we?”

“Being alive does rather compensate for a multiplicity of mutual idiocy,” he noted. “Now, what does ‘metagrobolising’ mean?”

“You just can’t stand not knowing, can you?”

“Listen here, I’m threatening to do diabolical things to you with this pot of ointment. Last chance.”

Tazithiel laughed. “Diabolical, Kal? Do your worst!”

They rested from mid-afternoon until dawn the following morning in a shallow cave on an Island apparently not infested by Anubam, although that did not stop Kal from waking at every noise, until the cruel, heartless girl-fiend, returned to her Dragoness-form, placed her paw atop his head and chest to force him into stillness. To his surprise, Kal slept very well after that, and woke up aching in only two dozen places or so.

Tazi woke, and groaned. She stretched her wings gingerly, and groaned louder. She stood, and shook the cavern with a groan of prodigious conception.

“I’m sorry you’re feeling so sore after all your exertions yesterday, Tazithiel,” said Kal, with withering insincerity. “Do you think you’ll be able to fly? Or shall I take over?”

“You’re a great flier, Kal. I loved all the arm-waving and the screaming. Very theatrical.”

“Who pulled his best girl from between a malodorous monster’s teeth, may I ask?”

The Indigo Dragoness pursed her lips. “A kiss for my brave champion.”

Kal, turning away in mock-horror, was more than startled to receive a firm bunt in the backside. “Fie, woman, I’m not kissing your scaly rump in return! Help me mount up. This valiant warrior who rode his Dragoness into battle yesterday has many aches and pains, the least of which–”

“The aches and pains of a man over forty summers in age,” suggested the Dragoness. “Though, you do know about the Dragon Rider effect, don’t you?”

“Might you be referring to my vastly augmented prowess on the pillow-roll? My ears ring with your repeated attestations.”

“No, you buffoon. Not everything in this world relates to that peculiar mushroom inside your trousers. I mean that Dragon Riders live longer lives than ordinary men and women.”

“They do?” Kal scaled her flank with the ease of a man half his–well, with ease. “You didn’t tell me that.”

“I’m full of surprises.”

“So I become more youthful? Is that why you look barely old enough to … uh, hold … um … will you stop doing that thing with your eyes?”

Tazithiel whirled her eye-fires again. “Don’t inflict your dirty fantasies on me, old man. We Dragons call this ‘making moon-eyes.’ ”

“I can’t think when you do that.”

“Evidently.” The Dragoness seemed as pleased as a young woman whose smile had just caused her admirer to walk straight into a doorpost. “No, Dragon Riders age more slowly, it seems. I’ve heard of Riders reaching two hundred summers, although most die younger–in battle.”

Kal sighed. Of course there would be a fly in this particular ointment. Not a large fly, given as he intended to avoid conflict wherever possible–and he was certain he was developing a generalised yet severe allergy to fireballs, champing fangs and flashing talons–but a fly nonetheless. Deftly, he fastened temporary ropes around his upper thighs and waist, securing himself to the Dragon Rider saddle and the spine spike behind him.

“Ready to see some drakes today?” asked Tazithiel.

Bah. Could he not just go rob a nice vault in peace? At least conventional treasure-troves did not bite or try to scramble his brains with hypnotic eye-fires and inarguably alluring eyelashes.

Two days, fifty-eight drake sightings–Kal insisted on keeping count–and two hundred and thirty leagues of flying later, the Indigo Dragoness finally spotted a Dragonwing of Dragon Riders. Kal counted half a dozen pairs silhouetted against a rose-pink dawn sky, besieged by innumerable, smaller flying Dragons. Drakes. He had better not make the mistake of naming them Dragons!

“They’re clearing out a nest of drakes,” Tazithiel hissed. “Shoddily.”

The dynamic of her wingbeat changed. Her belly-fires soughed eagerly. A hotter, more acrid smoke wafted to Kal’s nostrils. The Indigo Dragoness was primed for action. The man aboard, somewhat less so.

“Tazi, can we talk before we go charging in?”

“Talk? Why of course, Kal. Our fellow Dragons and Dragon Riders are being eaten alive. What would you like to talk about? Don’t forget your helmet.”

Kal limbered up his Dragon war-bow. Perhaps she was right. Perhaps his initiation to Dragon-battle was best enacted in a desperate arena where his fellow-Riders were being shredded by shoals of vicious, snapping enemies; receiving the long end of the noose, as thieves might jest. Rather morose, thieves, as a rule fond of fireflower humour suited to wild nights spent mooching in graveyards.

Meantime, Tazithiel accelerated to attack velocity as she swooped down upon a melee which did not become the slightest bit more attractive, the more detail Kal made out. The drakes struck him as the hired thugs of the Dragon world–all intimidating spiked armour, mean underslung jaws and the need to hunt in packs to down a single victim. Nasty customers. They behaved like schools of fish he had seen in terrace lakes, only these thirty-foot snapping monsters were vicious and armed to the teeth, and their fighting strategy appeared to major on eating opponents alive.

The group of Dragon Riders was only six strong, while at least four dozen drakes mobbed them. Why had they allowed themselves to become so outnumbered, he wondered?

“Oh–that Red, I know him!” Tazithiel bugled. “That’s Jalfyrion, from Mejia. Mmm, he’s found himself a female Dragon Rider.”