Dragonbound: Blue Dragon (4 page)

Sure, it could get hot inside during a dragon attack, but the buildings stayed standing unless the dragons got their claws into them.

Chandran led Kanvar past the army barracks to the camdor stables where a piercing camdor shriek filled the air, followed by the sound of wood splintering and a horrible scraping of claws against stone. The camdor keeper, his two assistants, and Samdrasen's second in command, Pachai, raced out of the stone building and slammed the door. From inside came more clawing and the scream of a very angry camdor.

"Still can't calm him?" Chandran said as he walked up to the shaken group. Pachai's face contorted into a grimace. "I don't understand it. He's been my best mount. I trained him up from a hatchling myself. It's like he's suddenly gone mad."

Chandran put a hand on Kanvar's shoulder and propelled him forward to stand in front of Sadiq, the camdor keeper. "Kanvar has a way with the critters. Why don't you let him take a look?"

Pachai sneered at Kanvar in disbelief.

"That camdor would kill him in half a heart beat," Sadiq protested.

Kanvar had made friends with Chandran's camdor, Trilok, within moments of meeting it. Kanvar preferred to sleep in the stall with Trilok, but seldom did. He couldn't risk anyone thinking he had some special affinity with dragons, even lesser ones. He'd befriended Pachai's camdor along with many of the others when he'd first come to the colony.

Chandran laughed. "I'm telling you, the boy's a natural with them. Let him try to calm it."

Kanvar swallowed hard and shook his head. He couldn't do this with so many people watching, they might figure out what he was.

Chandran's grip tightened on his shoulder like dragon talons digging into his flesh. "You will do it," Chandran said in a terrifyingly angry voice. He'd never talked to Kanvar like that before.

Still, Kanvar shook his head.

"You listen to me, boy. You're mine for the rest of the day, and you
will
calm Pachai's camdor. Because if you don't, we'll have to shoot it. That beast is worth a lot of money. Money I'll hold to your account if you fail. Understand?"

Kanvar gasped. That amount of money would put him in servitude for three more years.

Ignoring the protests of the other men, Chandran opened the stone door a crack and thrust Kanvar inside. The door slammed shut behind Kanvar, leaving him in semi-darkness. Gray daylight shone in from the upper window slits. The windows were small to keep the Great Blues from reaching in and having a meal of the camdors.

The stable was a long low building that housed over one hundred camdors in sections of ten. The sections were separated by stone walls, but the stalls themselves were wooden since camdors did not breathe fire.

Kanvar peered into the darkness while waiting for his eyes to adjust. He relied instead on a different sense, one he never talked about. Somehow deep inside he felt the presence of the angry camdor as well as the fact that the other stalls were empty. Ever so faintly he sensed the camdors in the next section over.

A loud shriek rent the air, and the camdor burst out of a stall on Kanvar's left, tearing through the wood with its short front claws and slamming its long tail against the stone wall. The front claws were chipped from the creature tearing at the stone walls and blood oozed around the nails. Condensation glistened on the camdor's mottled tan and green scales. The creature heaved in short angry breaths. Scales along a section of its tail were mangled as if it had slapped the stone walls repeatedly, and a big round lump swelled on its left side above its ribs.

The camdor caught sight of Kanvar and dove at him, its short claws raking the air. Kanvar dodged out of its way, and the creature hit the stone door.

Screaming piteously, the camdor rubbed its left side back and forth against the door before twisting its head around and snapping deadly teeth at Kanvar.

Kanvar ducked and scuttled away. The keeper was right Pachai's camdor had gone crazy. Waves of pain and fury lashed at Kanvar's mind. But he could not tell what had brought the animal to this state without touching a part of his own mind that he'd only touched once and avoided all the years since then, though the sound of his father's voice in his mind still haunted him.
Kanvar, run!

Kanvar wasn't ready to face that part of himself, but if he did not, the crazed camdor would kill him.

Kanvar limped along the row of broken stalls, trying to get more space between himself and the camdor. The camdor bellowed and charged after him. Kanvar ducked behind a splintered wall.

No choice, Kanvar had to do it. It shouldn't be hard without his mother holding the singing stone with its painful voices. Kanvar touched the spot in his mind where he'd heard his father's last message.

Once when Kanvar was young, his parents had taken him to see Grandfather Raza's triumphant return from raiding a Great Red dragon's lair. He'd killed the dragon and paraded through the streets of Daro, holding the flashing red dragonstone high above his head while thousands of adoring people thronged him, shouting their admiration. So many voices raised in a jumble that Kanvar could not make out the words. So many people crowded around that little Kanvar had been pressed up against his father and smothered. He might have died if his father hadn't lifted him up onto his strong shoulders.

The same sensation of indecipherable voices and a pressing throng leapt into Kanvar's mind now. Not the press of human bodies and voices, but those of dragons, all the camdors in the stable, the kitrats that ran along through the sewage ditches, the jewel dragonflies in the fields, the serpents that slithered along the jungle floor, the black monkey's that swung from tree to tree, and lesser green dragons, hungry, cunning and hunting. And beyond them a press of minds ancient and thoughtful. A flash of something that reminded Kanvar of the feeling of sitting at home by the fireplace on his father's lap. And then, shattering all the rest of the thoughts, those of the crazed camdor that reared up in front of Kanvar, screaming and clawing. Kanvar felt the searing pain in the camdor's side and the poison that maddened it.

"It's all right," Kanvar whispered, holding a soothing hand out to the Camdor. From the creature's tortured mind, Kanvar knew it didn't understand his words, but his intent to help it trickled through. That's what it wanted, help. Why wouldn't the humans help it?

"I'm going to help you," Kanvar said. "Just stay calm. Stay right there."

The camdor sank down on its haunches, whimpering. Kanvar eased around it and went to the tack room where the grooming equipment and saddles were kept. His side hurt like someone had shot a crossbow dart into him. No, not his side, the camdor's. Poor creature. Kanvar opened Chandran's tack box and pulled out a pair of long-nosed tweezers.

He limped back over to the trembling camdor and rubbed his hand down the creature's smooth scales. "I'm going to help you, but you have to hold still. Hold still and let me help."

The camdor let out a piteous wail but remained sitting.

Kanvar stuck the nose of the tweezers up under the scales near the lump on the creatures left side. He squeezed the tweezers closed and gave a sharp tug.

The camdor shrieked and bolted away, leaving Kanvar holding an engorged razor beetle that had somehow worked its way up under the camdor's scales and latched on, pinching, sucking, and spreading its poison through the camdor.

The camdor moaned, staggered into the remains of a stall, and lay down on a pile of straw.

Kanvar pulled his mind away from it. The sudden silence in his head was deafening, and a feeling of lonely emptiness swept over him. Kanvar shuddered and fell to his knees, shaking, still holding the ghastly beetle in the tip of the tweezers.

That's how Chandran, Pachai, and the keeper found him when they rushed in after hearing the sudden silence in the stable.

"A razor beetle," Sadiq exclaimed. "No wonder."

"My poor camdor," Pachai said. "He'll need medicine to counteract the poison."

Sadiq rushed to the tack room and came back with a thick paste to put over the wound. The camdor lay still and let him apply it now that the razor-sharp pain in his side was gone.

"I guess you were right, Chandran," Sadiq said. "The boy is a natural. I'll take him as my apprentice as we agreed. Good work, lad."

Kanvar dragged himself to his feet. "I-I don't understand."

Chandran gave him a wide smile. "I know you like working with the camdors. I just apprenticed you to Sadiq. It's an honorable position, much better than someone like you could ever hope to attain."

"But I . . . at sunset, my indenture is over. I'm going to—"

"No. You are not going out into that jungle. I could never live with myself if I let you do that. The papers are already signed. You are now Sadiq's apprentice. It's all fixed and legal. Come on, let's go get your things."

Pachai took the tweezers with the beetle from Kanvar's hand and squashed the beetle with a loud splat between the sole of his boot and the stable wall.

Chapter Three

Back in Chandran's room
, Kanvar laid his sleep shirt across his blanket, tossed his sandals on top, and rolled up the bundle. Except for his crossbow, and the clothes and armor he wore, that was all he owned. Not much to show for his fifteen years. Nothing at all compared to the possessions he'd once had back in Daro. But he'd traded all of that willingly for his most precious and precarious possession, his own life. A possession that Chandran in trying to save had surely forfeited for Kanvar.

Kanvar had read over the contract. As Kanvar's legal guardian for the term of his indenture, Chandran had the right to apprentice him. A right Kanvar had never considered when he'd agreed to the indenture. The bitterness of his lost freedom stabbed his heart. He now had five years apprenticed to Sadiq. He doubted he'd survive that long. After his experience with the crazed camdor, Kanvar could not longer pretend the fever would never take him. It had been a painful reminder that he had been born a Naga. That he would die very soon, if he could not leave the colony and find the Great dragons.

Not the blues. By the fountain, he swore, not the blues. They'd kill him before they ever discovered he was a Naga. With as ferociously as they fought against the humans, odds were they considered Nagas traitors to the dragons just as much as the humans considered them traitors to the humans.

Somewhere out there lived other Great dragons. Reds in the living volcanoes, though the reds might kill him as fast as a blue. A Great Green was Kanvar's best chance. They lived in the densest parts of the jungle, lurking out of sight in the trees. The greens would paralyze their victims with poison secreted from beneath their scales and then take them back to their lair to eat them. Kanvar might be able to convince one of the Great Greens to bond with him. If he could find one. If he could get out into the jungle.

"I know what you're thinking," Chandran said from the cot where he sat sharpening his sword. "Don't try to run away. It won't work. I've already told all the soldiers to make sure you don't leave the colony."

An involuntary moan escaped Kanvar.

Chandran lowered the sword. His face softened. An earnest kindness came into his eyes. "Kanvar, please. You'll die out there."

Kanvar shook his head. "I know what I'm doing." He longed to boast that his grandfather had been Kamar Raza, and as a member of the Varna dragon hunter jati, Kanvar had learned every dragon hunting secret possible. But Kanvar couldn't do that without revealing his true identity as a Varnan as well as Amar's son and a Naga.

"No, you don't!" Chandran's face turned red. He shook his sword at Kanvar. "I had two sons. Two. And I lost both of them to the dragons. I will not lose you as well."

The great gong of the warning bell drowned out Kanvar's weak response.

Chandran sheathed his sword and raced outside. Kanvar followed. Afternoon clouds blocked the sun. In the subdued light Kanvar saw the spread of a Great Gold dragon's wings as it swooped from the mountains down toward the colony. A human rode just behind its massive head.

"I don't believe it," Chandran said in wonder. "A Great Gold and a Naga. They never attack the colony. Stay here," he told Kanvar as he joined the rush of soldiers to the defense of the city.

Kanvar clutched his rolled blanket to his chest but couldn't still his racing heart. His father? But it couldn't be. His mother had shot Amar, twice. The bell continued to toll. And Kanvar stayed frozen in place. Gold dragons weren't fighters like the blues. A single gold wouldn't have a chance against the whole Maran army. And the Maranies hated Nagas even more viciously than the Varnans. His father coming here would be suicide.

A shout went up from the wall. "They've caught him!"

That shocked Kanvar into action. He headed for the gate, still clutching his bedroll. Other colonists converged in the street, all eager to see the captured Naga. The sudden press of people made progress impossible for Kanvar. He fell to his knees in the crowd and was almost trampled before he could crawl to the closest building and drag himself back up.